(Written by Giorgio Pitacco, taken from “The Journal of American History”, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1919.)
The Honourable Giorgio Pitacco, a Member of the Municipal Council of Trieste, was a former Deputy to the Parliament at Vienna. He was thus in a position for close observation and first-hand knowledge of the Austrian intrigue for crushing the Italian soul out of Trieste and Dalmatia. From 1900 to 1910 he watched the Austrians driving human hordes of Slovenes and Croats into Trieste — solely to outnumber the Italian census. Laibach [Ljubljana] was the centre of this Austrian activity which actually subsidized its hirelings of Slovene business men, agents, and tradesmen to emigrate into essentially Italian cities, especially Trieste. This is the true explanation of the sudden disproportionate increase of the Slav element in the immediate environs of Trieste.
Doctor Pitacco was sent to America by the Political Association of Unredeemed Italians as their President. This association is composed of all those from the Unredeemed Provinces who succeeded in escaping to Italy during the War. It has over 10,000 members from Trieste, Istria, Trentino, Fiume, and Dalmatia. Among them are eleven Deputies to the Parliament at Vienna, thirty-five Deputies to the Provincial Diets, and fifty Mayors. The name of the Association explains itself; it was formed to crystallize the national determination of the Unredeemed Provinces.
– The Editors.
TRIESTE
By Doctor Giorgio Pitacco
Municipal Councillor of Trieste; Former Deputy to the Austrian Parliament
We have come to America in this period in which the future of our Unredeemed Country is to be decided, to implore the support of the generous American people. America, who, like Italy, entered the War of its own accord, for liberty and justice, will surely not permit the gravest kind of injustice to be perpetuated in separating from their Mother-Country provinces which always were, are, and are determined to remain, Italian.
Trieste, like the rest of Istria, as a sign of protest, refused to send representatives to the Austrian Parliament, in the hope that some day they might be able to send them to the Italian Parliament. The Provincial Diet of Istria, when called upon to elect its Deputies to the Parliament of Vienna in 1867, replied, "Not one," and dissolved the meeting. After universal suffrage was introduced, the Italians were obliged to participate in the political elections and send their Deputies, in order to defend their national existence and their economic interests.
After 1866, Austria, with the motive of depriving Italy of every claim to the territory along the Adriatic Sea, which had always been Italian, began a systematic plan of destruction of the indigenous Italian element, in which enterprise she received the effective support of the Croatians and Slovenes. All the Government offices were entrusted to the Slavs, to the exclusion of the Italians. In Trieste, for example, a city with a majority of 200,000 Italians in a population of 250,000, the whole personnel of the Department of Post, Railroads, Judiciary, Ports, and Customs, was Slav. The employees were sent from Carniola, Carintia, Stiria, and from other provinces that had nothing in common with the city of Trieste, either in language or customs. In one day alone they transported 700 families of Croatian and German railroad men, aggregating 5,000 persons in all, to Trieste. This system, which was carried out further by the order that the Italians should be deported for every small offense, was intended to secure for the Austrian Government a preponderant number of Slavs who had been taught to antagonize the Italians. For the same purpose the census was compiled, using figures so evidently false that the Central Committee of Vienna could not explain the sudden reduction of the Italian population from 78.27% to 62.31%, compared to an increase of 100% of the Slav population. This Committee, therefore, had to admit that the census was not reliable.
In spite of all this, the Italian character of Trieste was ardently maintained through the many Italian schools for which the community of Trieste alone paid an annual sum of over two and a half million crowns.
Trieste and Istria, which form a geographic whole, have always loyally demonstrated their great attachment to Italy, especially during this War. Many thousands of men from Trieste, Istria, Fiume, and Dalmatia volunteered in the Italian Army. Of these, hundreds died in action and eight were decorated with the gold medal for extraordinary acts of heroism. All these volunteers faced a double death: that on the battlefield, and that on the gallows, if they were captured, as in the case of Nazario Sauro from Istria, Francesco Riamondo from Spalato, and Cesare Battisti from Trento.
In the Parliament at Vienna, the Italian Deputies have held memorable debates. The one in defense of the municipal autonomy of Trieste in 1906, against the decree which deprived the city of its administrative independence, was particularly famous. Not a single one of the representatives of the various other peoples which formed the Austro-Hungarian Empire supported the Italians, with the exception of the Roumanians, who upheld them in their fight against this arbitrary act of the Government.
This war has brought into high relief the utter vileness of the reactionary and autocratic Government of Vienna. It, alas, is not yet obliterated, since it survives in the hatred of other peoples who are trying to reorganize themselves on the spoils of Austria.
Throughout the War, the Italian people have displayed wonderful qualities, on the battlefield and at home. A people whose wounded soldiers requested the physicians to attend to the enemy first, because they were more seriously wounded, whose same soldiers offered their own bread to their prisoners, because they knew them to be more hungry, are a people who can look the future straight in the face and await the triumph of Justice over every wicked intrigue.
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