DAY 154 - TRIESTE TO MALFALCONE: 18.7 MILES (37,400 STEPS)

23 September, 2011

18.7 miles (Total: 1467.84 miles) 37,400 steps (Total: 3,285, 881 steps)

One of the things which has struck me forcibly on my walk, is the shifting nature of land borders and government. Coming from an island nation where borders, with the exception of Ireland, have remained unmoved for hundreds or over a thousand years, it is particularly striking.

Trieste is a case in point; it began the last century as an ethnically diverse, culturally and commercially rich city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, it was claimed by Italy, from which time ethnic tensions began to increase with the Slovene and Jewish populations becoming a target for the Italian Fascist mobs. With the Italian armistice, Trieste came under the direct rule of Nazi Germany in 1943 as part of the Operation Zone of the Adriatic Littoral. During that time, virtually the entire Jewish population was removed to extermination camps. Slovenes too were persecuted and fled across the border into Yugoslavia. Trieste became the site of the only Nazi concentration camp on Italian soil and during this time the city was heavily bombed by British and American forces.

After WWII Trieste came briefly under the control of Tito’s Yugoslavia and then, as a result of the Treaty of Paris, came under the protection of the United Nations and was divided into two zones: one controlled by the US (Zone A), and one under the control of the British (Zone B). In 1954 Zone A became part of Italy and Zone B became part of Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). Trieste then found itself on the front line again as tensions rose along the Cold War border.

Six different governments and four different borders in the space of 100 years. Here is the interesting thing though—it has survived and Trieste is thriving again, life goes, buildings are rebuilt, people adapt.  As many parts of Italy are perhaps having a severe wobble because of the economic woes, I would imagine that the stoic response of the average Trieste octogenarian might be to shrug the shoulders and say “seen worse, survived worse” and they would of course be right, but they were the ‘lucky’ ones.