Trieste historical timeline

Trieste's history is short on medieval glory and very long on consequences.

Under Austria

A small Roman and medieval town, Trieste put itself under the Habsburgs in 1382 to escape Venice. It stayed provincial until 1719, when Charles VI declared it a free port and the empire began building a maritime capital there.

The imperial century

Between 1750 and 1914 the population grew roughly twentyfold. Greeks, Serbs, Jews, Slovenes, Germans and Italians came for the trade; the shipping company Lloyd Austriaco ran lines to the Levant and India, and the city became the empire's outlet to the world.

Italy

Trieste was the great prize of Italian irredentism and was annexed in 1918. Losing its hinterland to new borders wrecked the economy almost immediately.

Fascism and occupation

The regime forcibly Italianised Slovene schools, names and institutions. After 1943 the city came under direct German administration, and the Risiera di San Sabba was put into operation as a detention and killing site.

1945 to 1954

Yugoslav forces held the city for forty days in 1945; killings in the karst pits, the foibe, date mostly from this period and from 1943. Trieste then spent nine years under Anglo-American administration before returning to Italy in 1954.

The Free Territory

The 1947 peace treaty created a Free Territory of Trieste in two zones, one Anglo-American and one Yugoslav. It never functioned as a state, and the 1954 memorandum handed the city to Italy and the countryside south of it to Yugoslavia, a line only formalised by treaty in 1975.

The exodus

Some 250,000 Italians left Istria and Dalmatia between 1943 and the 1950s. Many passed through or stayed in Trieste, and the city's politics still carry it.