Beatrice Raveggi – Daniela Velli: In time of peace - Inspired by the true story of Claudio Bronzin, Istrian exile

Beatrice Raveggi – Daniela Velli
Ed. The ship of dreams, Treviso 2023
pagg.112

This essay is structured in two parts, one where the life of Claudio Bronzin, an Istrian exile born in 1935, is narrated in the first person, the other where the fundamental events relating to the Adriatic border from 1861, the birth of the Kingdom of Italy, up to the present day are summarised.

Claudio Bronzin lived “in Pula, in present-day Croatia, which was once Yugoslavia, and before that Italy”[...] Everything then, in those comfortable streets all around the Roman arena, spoke Italian”. And, of his childhood, spent there, he remembers the first bombing, in January 44, when everyone was convinced, instead, that “in Pola there are no bombs, they are not bombing us”. And from that moment begins for Claudio, for his family and for all their fellow citizens, a life spent hiding underground, “in the labyrinth of tunnels that the Austrians had dug into the rock beneath the city like a spider’s web.” A life made of “meals interrupted, games and homework left half-finished on the kitchen table.”

From then on, the bombing of Pola by the Allied forces became more and more frequent.. “The aim was to flush out fascists and Nazis who, after the Armistice, had gone over to the enemy's side for Italy”. This is how the Bronzin family decided to abandon “that life of rats in the damp tunnels of air raid shelters”, moving to Lisignano, a small Slavic-speaking village not far from Pula, and it was thanks to this move that Claudio met Dr. Geppino Micheletti. In fact, it was he, who worked at the hospital in Pula, who treated him for a wound on his foot, not in the hospital, however, but at his home, where Claudio met the doctor's two sons, Carlo and Renzo, as well as his wife Jolanda. “When my father asked him how much he owed him for the visit and the treatments, he responded like this: Do you know what you owe me, Bruno? Tell me thanks and we're fine like this.”

Meanwhile, in Pula, “in the forty days preceding the arrival of the English, Tito's partisans had looted everything, from food to furniture, they had even taken away the hospital beds. […] It seemed impossible that that horde of soldiers, without shoes and with trousers full of holes, represented the winner. […] In those forty days, from Trieste and throughout the Venezia Giulia, several compatriots mysteriously disappeared”. Teachers, postmen, landowners, bank officials, as well as partisans who did not submit to Tito's pan-Slavic plan, were mainly the victims of Tito's violence. “Milovan Dilas, a Montenegrin convinced revolutionary and right-hand man of Tito, had organized anti-Italian propaganda throughout Istria to convince the Allied forces that those lands were Slavic by right. This was not true, but the Italians had to be induced to leave, by any means”.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon, August 18, 1946. “The whole city gathered on the Vergarolla beach to watch the twenty-eighth Scarioni Cup, the long-awaited swimming competition and also yet another demonstration of Italianness, the most useless: the die had already been cast, Pola and the other Istrian cities would be given to Yugoslavia as war compensation”. Claudio is there with his family. Stocked on the beach are some defused explosive cylinders, once used to defend the port from submarines and now part of the landscape, so much so that they no longer scare anyone. The children, among those cylinders, played hide and seek. “It’s 14:10 pm, a sharp, metallic blow bites the air, suddenly, sinks its nails into the clear sky and tears it apart, a resounding whiplash violently shakes every corner of that peaceful Sunday, for miles, treacherously strikes the blow into the sleeping heart of the city”.

It's a massacre. “Every Polesano lost someone that day.” Doctor Geppino Micheletti immediately rushed to the hospital. “He did not leave his post for twenty-six hours straight; many of the people he treated in those hours owe their lives to him.” And this, despite having known that the body of his son Carlo had been found, while there was no trace of Renzo, except for a shoe and a sock. In the end, twenty bodies of children were found, victims of that massacre. At the funeral, Dr. Micheletti carried the coffin of his son Carlo. “The wood of that coffin was light, but the wood of that cross was so heavy!” It could not have been an explosion due to a fortuitous accident, but a deliberate act. Suspicion fell on the OZNA, the Yugoslavian service for the security of the people. Thus it was that in Pola, after Vergarolla, in the hearts of all “only one unanimous decision had matured: to leave, to pack up life as best we could and to face that forced uprooting in order to continue to live as Italians. […] Faithful to the point of having to share with Dante, our beloved poet, the experience of exile, in order to remain Italian. Italians twice over: by birth and by choice”.

In just over three months, Pula became a ghost town. “More than 300.000 people fled from all over Istria, from Fiume and Dalmatia, from the “paradise” Tito.” Nails became the most valuable asset. Each family was given 300 grams, along with wooden planks. “From morning till night, everywhere you could hear the sound of industrious hammers nailing down drawers, sealing doors, packing up household goods.”

The steamship Toscana, which shuttled between Pola, Ancona and Venice between the beginning of February and the end of March, became the symbolic ship of the Julian exodus. “Italians ready to eat onions and live in large rooms divided by blankets for years, just to remain free and maintain their dignity, while others enjoyed their Istrian homes”. One hundred and nine refugee camps were set up throughout the peninsula. Their belongings were waiting for them on the dock in Trieste, in Warehouse 18. “There was a hidden life, suspended, among those household goods, among the everyday objects piled up in that shelter, at the old port.” Dr. Micheletti ended up in Narni, where he continued his work as a surgeon in the local hospital. “In the pocket of his coat was little Renzo's sock, which always accompanied him.” The Bronzin family found themselves in Florence, which became a second homeland for Claudio. In fact, he graduated and got married there, but his heart remained in Pola, where he returned from time to time and where, however, “They speak another language and people I don't know live in my house. The beach of Vergarolla is completely fenced off by a high wall topped with barbed wire. Only the cemetery has remained the same. Among the tombs, where the dead have learned forgiveness, you can still read some Italian surnames, badly masked by a final ch”.

Written by two teachers (Daniela Velli, in particular, is also president of the Florence section of the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia), this book, as the historian Gianni Oliva recommends in the preface, should be used in classes, “have students read it, enhance its expressive power.[…] A precious opportunity for all teachers who want to address the issue of the foibe and the Julian-Dalmatian exodus seriously”.

Gianlorenzo Capano