Navigating Home: Remapping the Adriatic in the Archipelago of Italy's “Lost Territories”

In the 1990s, political shifts in Italy and the former Yugoslavia created new audiences for and interest in the history of large-scale migratory flows out of Italy’s (former) territories in the eastern Adriatic after World War II. Although popular accounts often posit a continuous logic of violence (that of ethnic cleansing) between events in Venezia Giulia between 1943 and 1954 and those of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a more critical historiography has begun to insert the story of Italy’s lost Adriatic possessions into a broader narrative of violent displacement that transformed Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. In contrast, this paper adopts a novel approach that links the history of refugees from Italy’s former Adriatic lands with the repatriation of Italian nationals from Italy’s African and Aegean colonies. The “Italian” populations in these former possessions shared a common fate – displacement to the Italian peninsula with the status of “national refugee” -- as the result of fascism’s defeat. A fleet of ships that plied the Mediterranean and the Red Sea bringing Italian refugees “home” to Italy literally linked these populations together, as did their shared residence in refugee camps and, later, refugee housing. In charting this history, this paper traces out little-known links between the Adriatic and other seas and continents beyond those of its regional ecumene.