Friuli-Venezia Giulia - History

History

In Roman times, modern Friuli-Venezia Giulia was located within Regio X Venetia et Histria of Roman Italy. The traces of its Roman origin are visible over all the territory. In fact, the city of Aquileia, founded in 181 BC, served as capital of the region and rose to prominence in the Augustan period.

Starting from the Lombard settlements (6th century), the historical paths of Friuli and Venezia Giulia begin to diverge. In 568, Cividale del Friuli (the Roman Forum Iulii (from which the name Friuli comes)) became the capital of the first Lombard dukedom in Italy. In 774, the Franks, favoured the growth of the church of Aquileia and established Cividale as a March. In 1077, Patriarchate of Aquileia was given temporal power by the Holy Roman Emperors and this power was extended temporarily even to the east. But already in the 12th century Gorizia had actually become independent and Trieste, along with other coastal towns, organized itself as a free city-state.

In the 6th century, the Alpine Slavs, ancestors of present-day Slovenes, settled the eastern areas of the region. They settled in the easternmost mountainous areas of Friuli, known as the Friulian Slavia, as well as the Kras Plateau and the area north and south from Gorizia. In the 12th and 13th century, they also moved closer to Trieste.

Friuli became Venetian territory in 1420, while Trieste and Gorizia remained under the Austrian Empire. Pordenone was a "corpus separatum", under Austrian influence until 1515, when it also fell under the Venetian rule. With the peace treaty of Campoformido in 1797, Venetian domination came to an end and Friuli was ceded to Austria. After the period of domination by Napoleon, which affected also Trieste and Gorizia, it again became part of the Austrian Empire and was included in the Lombard-Veneto Kingdom, while Gorizia was merged with the Illyrian Kingdom and Trieste, together with Istria, became part of the Austrian Coastal Region. The enlightened policy of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries encouraged an extraordinary economic flourishing, making Trieste the empire’s port. The fortunate outcome of the war of independence brought Friuli alone into the unified Kingdom of Italy.

After the First World War, in which this region was a main theatre of operations and suffered serious damage and loss of lives, the fates of these border lands were again united, although Venezia Giulia, in particular, was the subject of the explosion of contradictions regarding the borders.

The Second World War led to the Anglo-American Administration in Trieste until the border was fixed with the Memorandum of London in 1954. When Trieste was reunited with Italy, the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia could finally be established. The Italian Constitution assigns it the status of Region with a Special Statute, together with four other Italian regions. However, Friuli – Venezia Giulia obtained administrative autonomy and the special statute only in 1963. The reasons for this "constitutional delay" are interwoven with the international problems of the second postwar period and with those deriving from the region’s "diversity" – the different historical, ethnic, and linguistic components that go to make up this area. In 1975 the Treaty of Osimo was signed in Osimo, definitively dividing the former Free Territory of Trieste between Italy and Yugoslavia.