La città italianissima. Usi e immagini di Trieste nel dibattito politico del dopoguerra (1945-1954)

This thesis concerns the use of the political myth of Trieste and its public reception in Italy between 1945 and 1954, during the first decade of Italian Republic and within the context of Cold War. In those years Trieste - who was under an Anglo-American military government and was involved in a difficult diplomatic conflict with Yugoslavia - was strongly associated with the themes of fatherland, nation, “italianità”. The myth of “italianity” of Trieste, representation of post-Risorgimento and Irredentism, was as a matter of fact one of the most enduring, which imbued the italian public discourse with its patriotic rhetoric, especially during the ten years of dispute over the return of Trieste to Italy. In those years Trieste, together with the memory of Irredentism and the Great War to which the name of the city was associated, and despite its complex ethnical situation, was at the center of an impressive political debate, that took the subject out of purely political and parliamentary offices and managed to join widespread culture’s environment as a key point in the patriotic imagination. I tried to outline the profile of this myth, investigating its representations and languages, the persistence of sentimental factors as well as the differences between the patriotic narrative practices of Christian-Democrats, Communists, Socialists, Monarchists and the extreme right wing of the MSI. The research, that was developed through the examination of popular and political press and of parliamentary acts, aims to understand how the dissemination of references, languages and methods of the patriotic narrative have changed during the decade, considering also the signals of the crisis of the patriotic myths along the changes that Italy would have lived in the early years of the Republic.