‘Sounds like they’re nailing down a coffin,’ the old man muttered. The men around him wore gloomy expressions and the women were crying silently. A little farther away, the British soldiers were driving long, yellow iron stakes into the ground (figs. 1–2).

A little while later, a young man knelt in front of the first stake and peered down the row.

‘If they keep going this way, they’ll cut Luca’s house in half,’ he commented. Then he got up and opened his arms in a forlorn gesture. ‘Anyway, my land is all gone.’

A steady, light north wind, the...

‘Wolkenbruch’ (Cloudburst) was the code name for the operations carried out by the Germans to reconquer Istria and Dalmatia after Tito’s forces marched into them in the wake of 8 September 1943. It was launched at the beginning of October from Trieste, Pola, Fiume, and other coastal centres that the Germans had seized after the Italian surrender. Three armed divisions of SS troops and two divisions of infantry, one of them composed of Turkman soldiers, hurled themselves inland, leaving slaughter and destruction in their wake. The Yugoslav partisans did not even try to resist; they fleden masseinto the...

‘Pola, February 1947. These days, whoever arrives in Pola finds a perplexing spectacle in front of him,’ wrote Tommaso Besozzi in a masterful article from Istria for the Italian weeklyL’Europeo:

Everywhere the signs of departure, and there is no doubt that this is a nearly total departure. Thirty thousand out of thirty-four thousand have asked to be transferred to Italy and thirty thousand will, in fact, abandon their houses before Pola is handed over to Tito’s soldiers. Along the docks, from Scoglio Ulivi to nearly as far as the Arsenal, there are enormous piles of furniture. The snow has...