History by Walking Around: the new tourist destination of Quartiere Giuliano Dalmata

 

As usual with Rome, we find some of the most interesting information - and add to our knowledge of history -  just by walking around. Last year - when we were walking back from our intended destination of the Laurentina 38 housing project (about which Bill wrote in July 2019) we ran across this "monument" (top photo) - with the words "To the fallen, Giuliani Dalmati," placed on a large boulder from the Carso - a rocky region of Italy that was the subject of Italian/Austria-Hungary battles in World War I, and was a focus of competing armies and political interests again in World War II. 

We also saw on a nearby building this plaque, 

which basically reads:

March 1947: The Exodus of Italian Pola: Hospitable Rome welcomes the Istrian, Fiumean [Fiume is now called Rijeka] and Dalmation refugees. President Oscar Sinigaglia [a street in the map below bears his name], with the National Organization of Repatriated Workers and Refugees, gives life to the "Giuliano Dalmation Neighborhood"  The plaque is marked as put up by the National Association of Venezia, Giulia, e Dalmazia (Venezia-Giulia and Dalmatia)

Quite difficult to make sense of this if one is less that fully knowledgeable about Italy's role in World War I, Fascism and World War II, plus some post-World War II history. In giving it a try recently, we ran across an article touting the restoration of the monument at the top of this post, "after years of neglect and degradation" (it didn't look so bad to us in 2019!) only this past October.

And, even more recent, on December 30 of this past year, the "Quartiere Giuliano Dalmata" (map at end of post) was welcomed - with a plaque and Q Code - in the tourist layout of Rome. 

Not exactly readable here, but the plaque relates that the "quartiere" or neighborhood started in 1939 as workers' housing for laborers building Mussolini's E42 expo grounds (now the fully developed EUR zone, which is featured in our books) a few miles further south of Rome. 

When the war brought Mussolini's unfinished international exhibition construction to a halt, the workers abandoned the housing. The Allies occupied the buildings for a while. When they left, in 1947, a nucleus of 12 families - fleeing their homes in Pola, which was ceded to Yugoslavia and is better known as the Istrian Peninsula - were settled here. The dorms were converted to small apartments, and in 1955 another 2,000 people from the ex-Italian Pola region settled here, giving the quarter its name. 

There are still some political joustings and resentments over the "exodus." Apparently (I'm trying to tread lightly here) some of the Italians were settled in the Istrian Peninsula by the Fascist government, which claimed the area and wanted it settled by, and dominated by, Italians.

The boulder monument was put up in 1961, and in 2008 a sculpture (photo below, right) was erected in the nearby Largo Vittime delle Foibe Istriane ("Largo [something like a piazza] Victims of the Istrian Foibe").  Bill commented on the sculpture in a 2011 post here. 

Delving into the foibe (deep sink holes into which victims were thrown, sometimes alive) and their political ramifications is beyond my pay grade at this point - perhaps for a later post.  Because the Day of Remembrance for the victims and those in the exodus that resulted in the neighborhood described here is February 10 - not long ago - we offer a link to an Ansa article describing the reasons for the Day of Remembrance (and a bit of the politics).

Dianne

Rome's Worst Public Sculptures: Nominees, Group 2

Exhale.  Continue on down via delle Sette Chiese, around the curve to where it dead-ends at via Ostiense.  Move ahead into the Park L. Schuster, and right, north toward the Centro.  Here you'll find one of our sculpture nominees. It's nothing to write home about, but then that's the theme of this post. More monoliths, as if invoking Stonehenge was all that was required of an artist. Hugging both sides of a walkway, the pieces seem to suggest passage, but to what? The road beyond? A flower bed? We don't know who made this, but then, do we need to?


 
 
 
A short walk south, beyond the Basilica San Paolo and a few meters to the left, is the San Paolo stop on Metro B.  Take the Metro to the end of the line--Laurentina--after the line curls around EUR.  Emerging from below, you'll find yourself in a piazza of sorts.  At the far end is the sculpture--this one a sculpture/monument.  We'll mute our humor here, because the subject of the work could not be more serious.  Dating from February, 2003, it is dedicated "To the martyrs of Istria, Venezia-Giulia, Fiume, and Dalmatia, 'infoibati' and drowned for their love of liberty and of Italy (1943-1947)."  Although every aspect of the events being memorialized here is controversial, what is clear is that at least hundreds and probably several thousand (perhaps as many as 20,000) Italian soldiers and civilian citizens were massacred--summarily executed--between 1943 and 1949, in the areas mentioned--especially the massive Istrian peninsula--mainly by Yugoslav Partisans seeking to cleanse these areas of ethnic and political populations likely to oppose Communist Yugoslav rule.  In some cases, the motive was revenge for years of repression of the slavic population under Italian Fascism.  (During the interwar years, Istria was part of Italy). 

We have set off the word "infoibati" because it bears so importantly on these events.  The word derives from "foibe," a word that appears in the Bepi Nider poem, "Istria," that accompanies the sculpture (see verse at right).  Foibe refers to a particular type of deep sinkhole for which the area was known.  Some of those murdered, though by no means all, were thrown alive into the "foibe," there to end their lives in the most horrific way.  So powerful is the image that the word foibe (and infoibati, the verb) has come to have a larger, symbolic meaning: to refer to all those who were killed and disappeared in the Yugoslav-occupied territories.  So the killings are often referred to as the "Foibe killings" or "Foibe massacres."

It is remarkable that the commemorative assemblage that we see before us exists at all.  Not until 1991, when Slovenia became independent, was there an investigation of the foibe by any country or international body.  The Italian government was reluctant to bring up the subject because to do so would have meant raising issues of Italian treatment of slavic populations under Fascism.  The Italian Left was equally reluctant to acknowledge the role of Communist partisans in the foibe killings.  Early in the new century there was a change, and both Berlusconi's center-right coalition and the Left, under the leadership of Walter Veltroni,  agreed that it was time to make some effort to come to terms with the events of the 1940s.  "The time has come," said Italian President Ciampi, "for thoughtful remembrance to take the place of bitter resentment." 




Edvard Munch, "The Scream," 1893

We can appreciate the monument as part of this remembering and healing process.  But the sculpture, and Nider's poem, seem less about healing than about remembering the horrors of the foibe, of a slow death in a deep cave.  That seems to be the purpose of the humanoid shapes that dominant the monument, figures of agony, screaming in disbelief at what is being done to them.  Complicating the presentation, these tortured souls seem both derivative--some version of Edvard Munch's much-publicized "Scream" series, painted between 1893 and 1910--and curiously unreal and even comical or gay, akin to shouting flowers. 

It should be said that few such commemorative efforts have the power to evoke powerfully loss and tragedy; Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the tribute to those who died in the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome, are exceptions to that rule.  The monument to the Istrian massacres and the foibe killings is not at that level, and its location in an unattractive piazza at the end of the subway line works to deprive the sculpture of any profundity it might otherwise have.

Bill