The “Italians” of Dalmatia: A 19th-Century Creation

Even those works that are critical of Italian nationalist narratives are undermined by the shortcomings inherent to the Italian historiography of the region, which takes national forms of identification for granted, applies them anachronistically to “non-national” centuries, and conflates Venetian language and culture with the Italian (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2007; Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012; Maritan Reference Maritan2022a). Nemec and others (Reference Nemec, Pupo and Vinci2019, 9), for example, still argue that in the eastern Adriatic “the Italian language (in its Venetian version) and Italian culture, together with the advantages related to Italianisation, have been able to assimilate the contribution coming from the eastern Mediterranean and the Slavic hinterland throughout the centuries.” The authors (Nemec et al. Reference Nemec, Pupo and Vinci2019, 54) do acknowledge the melting pot of the region stemming from the “processes of centuries-old integration of people from the Slovene and Croatian hinterland, the Italian peninsula, the eastern Mediterranean […], Hungary and the German states.” Yet they conclude that this contribution was added to “the Italian national group that was historically settled in Venezia Giulia, Fiume, and Dalmatia, […] [although its] Italian identity had an ethnic character only partially (represented by the settlements of the age of Romanization).” This uncritical conflation of the Italian and Venetian languages and culture – which considers Italian identity as a pre-existing category and does not understand that Venice, for centuries bound up with the eastern Adriatic and the Aegean Sea, was “nationally amorphous,” as the Triestine socialist and internationalist Angelo Vivante (Reference Vivante1912, 46) put it – undermines the credibility of their discussion on the history of the Adriatic (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012).

With regard to the similar context of Fiume/Rijeka, in 1919, hundreds of Italian academics would maintain that “the Italian roots of Fiume are in the early days of the Roman Empire” and that the medieval municipality of Fiume/Rijeka “always preserved its autonomy and transferred from the use of the Latin language to that of the Italian” (Professor of the University of Bologna 1919, 2–3). The Bologna academics went on arguing that “for centuries, this municipal independence and national character were not questioned notwithstanding the pressure of the neighboring Slavic peoples” (1919, 2–3). This view, while mirroring Nemec and others’ (Reference Nemec, Pupo and Vinci2019) recent work, also echoes late 19th-century Italian attempts to integrate Venetians into the new Italian polity, turning the Venetian overseas past into an Italian story. At the same time, “the Republic of Saint Mark’s experience as a major imperial power permitted Venetians […] to reinvent themselves as integral to a new state from which they had initially felt alienated” (Laven and Damien Reference Laven, Damien, Berger and Miller2015, 518).

Yet Venetian had for centuries been distinct from the Italian language. As Ronnie Ferguson put it with regard to the historical status of the Venetian language, which is indicative also of the distinct nature of Venetian history,

This writing-speaking dichotomy continued once Latin was supplanted by Italian as the written language and characterized the relationship between the Italian language and Venetian in its various colonial versions. Moreover, as Ferguson again, put it, “the ‘Italian’ of the Istrian and Dalmatian coasts that flourished well into the twentieth century was essentially Venetian” (Reference Ferguson2007, 212–213). Nationalist activists, but also official Habsburg censuses, contributed to the process of nationalization of the Habsburg Monarchy by reducing vernaculars “to a set of predetermined linguistic categories […] from among the following: ‘German, Bohemian-Moravian-Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Slovene, Serbian-Croat, Italian-Ladino, Romanian, and Hungarian’” and neglecting the widespread phenomenon of multilingualism (Stergar and Scheer Reference Stergar and Scheer2018, 580).

It was this nationalization of politics that contributed to the historiographical emphasis on national groups whose relationship was supposedly based on competition, distrust, and enmity. Italian historiography has been widely influenced by the view according to which Franz Josef was strongly anti-Italian and that Habsburg policies were centered on favoring Slavs against the Italian element in Trieste and throughout Dalmatia (see for example Monzali Reference Monzali2009, 69). This view has been fueled by the lack of support given in Dalmatia to the Italian party in its struggles against the Yugo-Slavic counterpart, in the attempt to preserve Italian as the main language of education in the region and retain the privileged social standing of the mainly Italian-speaking elites of Zara/Zadar and Spalato/Split. The question of language use pitted Dalmatian autonomists, Slavic liberals, Pan-Slavists, and “Italianissimi” against each other; the authorities backed governor Philippovich’s support of the Slavic liberals, who had succeeded in securing rights for the Slavic language in the face of the privileges accorded to Italian (Paton 1867c). At the same time, Croatian historiography has partly yielded to the equally nationalist view according to which Dalmatia, as a Catholic South-Slavic region, was intrinsically Croatian. Italian and Slavic nationalist historiographies have thus tended to focus on aspects of conflict and emphasized Habsburg “oppression,” which then resulted in the classic picture of the Habsburg Monarchy as the “prison of peoples.” Yet the sources do not consistently deal with well-defined nationalities or conflictual relationships between Habsburg subjects.

Andrew Archibald Paton’s observations on the region in the middle of the century reveal historical knowledge and understandings of the multi-ethnic composition of Dalmatia. Paton’s travel account is a case in point since his Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic, published in 1849, abounds with shrewd ethnographic remarks that picture the multi-ethnic complexity of Dalmatian society from Fiume/Rijeka to Cattaro/Kotor. On Lord Russell’s recommendation, in June 1862, Paton would be appointed British consul at the newly re-established seat of Ragusa/Dubrovnik, which had been previously abolished in 1836 (Russell 1862). His post in the cultural capital of the region offered him a privileged position from which to observe Dalmatian and Montenegrin politics, French, Russian, and Italian activity in the area, and the condition of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in the Balkans. He discussed all these in consular reports that set them apart for their shrewdness and attention to detail from those of his counterparts, Perry at Venice and Brock in Trieste.

Paton (1867c) opened one of these reports with a comment that explains the apparent peripheral position of the eastern Adriatic, yet its significance for European politics: “at first sight the internal politics of Dalmatia have little interest for foreigners, but taken in connection with the question of Turkey in Europe and the curious transformation which the Austrian Empire is undergoing, there is much to give occupation to a reflective mind.” In his previous journey along the Dalmatian coast towards the middle of the century, which took him as far as Cattaro/Kotor, he captured the cultural and ethnic blend of Dalmatia as the “curious social marriage that carries the mind alternatively from the heights of the Balkan to the mouths of the Brenta” (Paton Reference Paton1849, 6), the Venetian river so dear to European intellectuals from Pushkin to Heine. Contrary also to present-day perceptions on pre-20th-century Dalmatia, Dalmatian culture was neither Italian nor properly Venetian. “The Slaav of the Adriatic,” as Paton (Reference Paton1849) called Dalmatians, was “brother to the Servian […] but while the varnish of civilisation in Servia is German and new, here it is older, and has come from Venice [Paton used the terms ‘Slaav’ and ‘Servian’ in his 1849 travelogue].”

His insights were confirmed years later, in 1861, by Dalmatian intellectuals discussing Italian and Slavic culture in Dalmatia and whether Dalmatia had to assert its autonomy, be incorporated into Croatia (as part of the Hungarian half of the Monarchy), or strive for unification to Italy. The debate had been triggered by the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy and resulted in a heated confrontation between people identifying with Italian culture and Slavic-Dalmatians. Lovro Monti (Reference Monti1861, 6), upholder of unification to Croatia notwithstanding his Italian heritage, noted that Croats and Dalmatians were both Slavic peoples, and that while “Croats drew on the sources of Germanic civilization, we [Dalmatians] drew on those of the Latin.” In response to the Zaratine municipal counsellor Duplancich, who had claimed that there was no Slavic civilization in Dalmatia, notwithstanding his Slavic surname, abbot Giovanni Danilo (Reference Danilo1861, 3–5) argued that the contemporary Italian population of Dalmatia did not originate from an ancient “Italian” population, for the previous Latin population was not Italian. And Danilo’s refutation of the supposed Italian and Dalmatian ethnogenesis is still relevant today and applicable to other present-day contexts where nationalist rhetoric is steeped in distant proto-national bonds, which figure so prominently in Anthony Smith (Reference Smith1996). As Monti, again, put it, “in Dalmatia there [was] no other nationality but the Illyrian-Serb, although there [were] several families of Italian origins and [Dalmatia was] culturally Italian in its most affluent class” (1861, 4). However, he argued that “if the mother-tongue, if the national sentiment was not cultivated, and is still not cultivated in that class, it does not follow as a consequence that it has relinquished the nationality of its fatherland,” by which he implied Dalmatia, wondering “who would dare claim that an immense majority sacrifice a natural right to a small privileged number” (Monti Reference Monti1861, 4).

Venetian culture and language had long been present in the region, yet they had been imported to the coasts of the Balkans, where even the dress and the red fez typical of Dalmatia resembled the Turkish costume (Paton Reference Paton1849, 5). It was a colonial culture that the local elites in particular at Zara/Zadar, the administrative seat of the Venetian and later Habsburg administration, adopted as their own and whose influence could be traced also in several words and expressions of the Slavic-Dalmatian spoken by the majority of the population. Even as late as the 1970s, notwithstanding the standardization of national cultures, in the Croatian dialect of Spalato/Split many nouns and adjectives were of Venetian and Triestine origin (Vidović Reference Vidović1974; Bezić Reference Bezić2016). Yet the blending of cultures and languages swiftly became a distant memory in a world that was being gradually nationalized.

Multi-Ethnic Coexistence, Cultural Hybridity, and the Venetian Colonial Legacy: Different (Ab)Uses of the Past

In March 1864, a final report of the committee for the equality between the Slavic language and Italian was read at a session of the Provincial Diet in Zara/Zadar (Klaić 1864, 19). Although Dalmatian politics would soon be polarized between the Slavic and Italian components – which tallied with the consolidation of the Italian nation state and the intensification of Croatian efforts to defy Hungary – the proposal that the Italian and Slavic languages should have equal status in public life was unanimously, if provisionally, approved. Although deputies agreed on the liberal principles underlying the need for Slavic to possess an equal status with Italian, soon the opposing parties diverged on the ways and extent to which such equality should materialize. The language question implied a power struggle between Italians and Slavs, insofar as Italian-speakers, a tiny minority of the Dalmatian population, sought to hold on to their waning privileged position in the face of the equality between the Habsburg nationalities introduced in March 1850.

As the report read by the Ragusa/Dubrovnik deputy Pulić (1864, 110) stated, in Dalmatia the Slavic and Latin elements had coexisted for centuries “led by the winged Lion [of Venice].” Pulić stressed that the two elements had been living alongside each other, without striving for power, and merged in the same people, the Dalmatian. As Kirchner Reill noted, “the majority of educated Dalmatians attempted to promote their region’s mixed cultural heritage” (Reference Kirchner Reill and Cole2007, 31). Contrary also to the later Yugo-Slav conflation of Venetian rule with Italian annexationism, in this context Venice was not seen as an exploitative state but rather as a polity for which Slavic-Dalmatians willingly fought until the end of the Republic, also taking an active part in the Venetian revolution of 1848 (Sondhaus Reference Sondhaus1992; Vrandečić Reference Vrandečić2000).

Although Pulić had described the almost complete absence of the Slavic language from public life in conciliatory terms, others (Klaić 1864, 120), professing union with Croatia as their ultimate aspiration, emphasized “the humiliating inferiority of the Slavic population of Dalmatia” as a result of the subordinate condition of the Slavic language with respect to Italian. Yet they did not advocate the exclusion of the Italian language from public life and education. As abbot Gliubich (Reference Gliubich1861) explained, all that was asked was the equality between the two languages. However, this proposal was enough for the Italian elite to consider their language threatened of being suppressed and replaced by the Slavic, which was an idea that even an ardent upholder of the Slavic character of Dalmatia, Monti, never contemplated. As Pulić stressed, Italian culture had been necessary for the attainment of a privileged condition for Dalmatian culture (1864, 111–112). And deputy Klaić’s (1864, 117) words on the Italian language personified the feelings of Slavic elites, which regarded Italian as “the language that the Dalmatian intelligentsia calls its own, that is our, with tender veneration and with no less affection than that shown earlier on when the Committee called the Slavic language our own.”

Even Monti, a staunch supporter of the Croatian annexation of Dalmatia, did not advocate the outright exclusion of Italian from public life. The introduction of the Slavic national language in bureaucracy and administration had to be gradual. Although, eventually, “in future, the national language should be the language of instruction in every school; in Dalmatian gymnasia, though, the Italian language and literature should keep the second place,” with also one or two Italian gymnasia in place (Monti Reference Monti1861, 12–13). The support of measures that would cater for “the insuppressible rights of nationality” by an upholder of union with Croatia at the same time meant that unification with Croatia, which would guarantee a Slavic future for the Adriatic coasts of the Balkans, did not imply the loss of Dalmatian autonomy (Monti Reference Monti1861, 6). Monti also argued that Croatian claims over Dalmatia were not grounded in reality, stating that “Dalmatia cannot be deprived of its autonomy without its consent” (Reference Monti1861, 13–14). The new united kingdom under the Habsburgs should be composed of the three provinces of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia, with none subordinated to the other (Reference Monti1861, 11).

Monti’s political program for Dalmatia was based on the conviction that “the only guarantee today, against external and internal dangers, is union with Croatia,” an idea that he shared with other politicians such as Klaić and Paulinović (Monti Reference Monti1861, 6). However, as Monti explained, “the historical rights advanced by Croatia with regard to Dalmatia are unfounded and false are the grounds on which they base their claims for [its] annexation” (1861, 11–13). He favored the formation of a federal triune kingdom in which its provinces would enjoy equal status (Monti Reference Monti1861). The final unification of Croatia into its modern-day configuration has legitimized the claim of the historicity of the Dalmatia union with Croatia, harking back to medieval times. Yet, as Sirotković (Reference Sirotković, Wandruszka and Urbanitsch1975, 470) noted, although Croatian nationalists were much concerned with “the territorial integrity of the kingdom,” the formula they used, the Triregnum, as they conceived it, had never actually existed. As it stood, it was only an aspiration that did not materialize until 1918, in that Dalmatia had never been part of a Kingdom of Croatia apart from a brief period in the Middle Ages.

Klaić argued that annexation to Croatia would boost the Slavic character of Dalmatia (1864, 117). Similarly, Monti had hoped that, by joining Croatia, Dalmatia would not Croatize itself but rather “acquire moral supremacy over Croatians and perhaps over the other South Slavs” (1861, 13). As Paulinović a vocal annexationist, put it in the Slavic language, “nobody will deny my affection for my language; but for this reason never thought I about opposing the Italian language, which after mine I love the most, as all my fellow countrymen love it” (1864, 137). Monti and Paulinović, who like several others in the Dalmatian Diet preferred using Slavic-Dalmatian instead of Italian, exemplify Dalmatians’ push toward a Dalmatian national identity and their eagerness to unite with Croatia while maintaining the distinctiveness of Dalmatian culture and respecting the Italian element of the region. Their words embodied the willingness of Slavic-Dalmatian politicians to preserve Italian, although as a minority language. It was not opposition to Italian that drove them, but the preeminent role it enjoyed, when the majority of the population used another language as their own.

The paradox was that at the same time local Italian speakers could do without knowing the Slavic language and “wish to judge about its completeness” as opposed to the “perfection” of Italian (Paulinović 1864, 137). Italian Dalmatians acknowledged this deficiency. Deputy Filippi granted that he did “not grasp the Slavic language to the point of understanding all that [Paulinović had] said” (1864, 123) in his speech, something the very same Bajamonti (1864, 124), major of Spalato/Split and towards the end of the century one of the most prominent Italian nationalists, admitted too. Their admissions not only testify to the rift existing between the Italian-speaking part of the elite and the Slavic population, whose needs they could not interpret, but is also evidence for the attitude of Italian speakers, whether Italian nationalist or autonomist – and loyal to the Habsburgs – which clung to the advantages deriving from belonging to a hegemonic culture (Culisić 1864, 129). The Italian deputies raised difficulties on the way in which to implement the equality of languages. Although he had acceded to the Slavs’ requests in the morning, Bajamonti “did not intend to destroy a real condition recognized by everybody, that is the existence of a minority of our population, significant in number and all the more for its civilization” (1864, 143). With his words Bajamonti professed his unconditional attachment to Italian culture. Bajamonti’s and other autonomists’ stance does not appear to reflect the long-held perception of Dalmatian autonomism, expressed by Miculian (Reference Miculian and Ghezzo2001, 41), as the attempt to preserve the Venetian legacy of Dalmatia – which the majority of Slavic deputies did not wish to undermine – but rather the desire to maintain the Italian-speaking hegemonic status in Dalmatian society.

Although they had all agreed in principle that the language of the population had to be the language of instruction in schools, “when, in order to apply this principle, it had to be determined what concrete way […] to implement this regulation, then in the committee difficulties arose that were reported to be unsurmountable (Pulić 1864, 129).” Pulić further discussed the question in the following terms, praising the Italian language in a way that resembles what Alexander Maxwell (Reference Maxwell2018) calls “supplicant nationalism”:

Italian historiography has regarded use of Italian in the public sphere in Dalmatia as evidence of the original Italianità of Dalmatia. Quite the contrary, it reflected the hegemonic role of the Italian language as a legacy of Venetian rule, which nevertheless did not imply an Italian character of Dalmatia. As Paulinović acknowledged, throughout Dalmatia “only at Zara [Zadar] it [could] be said that Italian [was] the family language of the majority of the population” (1864, 137).

What transpires from these minutes, which is also confirmed by the contemporary pamphlets here discussed, is the cultural exclusivity of Italian speakers as opposed to Slavic-Dalmatian elite’s acknowledgment of the fundamental contribution of the Venetian and Italian cultures to their own, which the prospect of union with Croatia did not undermine, in their hope of a future equal status of Dalmatia with Croatia. As a contributor to the Nazionale – the Italian-speaking paper of the Slavic party in Dalmatia – wrote from Fiume/Rijeka, it was necessary to give voice “to the national sentiments and tendencies in a language [namely Italian] that is more accessible to those who oppose them” (March 5, 1862). From 1848, when Kaznačić founded his paper in Ragusa, to Vojnović at Zara/Zadar until the 1870s, Slavic publicists endeavored to “rehabilitate the Croat name whereof there existed an ill-founded aversion against it” (Il Nazionale, March 5, 1862), given that previous attempts to address a Slavic audience in “Illyrian” as early as the 1830s had proved to be unsuccessful (Judson Reference Judson2016, 147). Their work shows a clear example of the use of Italian in Dalmatia as the medium of expression shared by the elites, whether Slavic- or Italian-speaking, since, to their own admission, Italian speakers did not have an excellent grasp of the Slavic language (Bajamonti 1864, 123–124).

Notwithstanding their conviction that Dalmatia was a Slavic province, Slavic elites in the region were well versed in Italian culture, as is also proved by the number of publications that Slavic-Dalmatians wrote in Italian. As late as 1867, notwithstanding the surge of annexationists to Croatia in the Dalmatian Diet and the growing popularity of union with Zagreb, Paton (1867a) saw “the maritime calling of Dalmatia” as a guarantee for the conservation of cultural ties with the Italian peninsula. “But this [did] not imply a desire for political union with Italy,” for apart from a few “Italianissimi,” that is the upholders of Dalmatian unification to Italy, Dalmatians considered “the affairs of Italy and Austria as wound up and terminated.” Nor was the calling of Pan-Slavism as popular in Dalmatia as the Austrian and Magyar press feared. For, if Russian and Serb propaganda had a resonance amongst fellow Orthodox Slavs, it did not breach among Catholic Slavs, who constituted the majority of the population of the eastern Adriatic. As Paton (1867b) observed, “the natural head of the Catholic Slavs whether Czech, Carnic [that is Carinthian], Croat or Dalmatian is the Emperor of Austria.” This, notwithstanding the dissatisfaction that the introduction of Dualism had triggered amongst the South Slavs of the Monarchy, who had been instrumental in the preservation of the dynasty in 1848 (Deàk Reference Deàk1979; Newman and Scheer Reference Newman and Scheer2018).

The Rise of Italian Nationalism in Dalmatia: Seeds of Sectarianism

Nevertheless, a few weeks later, Paton (1867c) noted that the Austrian military defeat to the Prussians in 1866 had fuelled “a recrudescence of Italian fanaticism all along the coast from Trieste to Spalato.” In the face of the struggle between the Yugo-Slav and Italian parties, the Emperor favored Governor Philippovich’s support of the moderate Slavs, who opposed both Italian and Pan-Slavist chauvinism. Hence, the trope whereby the Habsburgs supported the Slavic element against the Italian does not capture the actual situation of the eastern Adriatic. The concessions made by Philippovich to the moderate Slavs in the field of education triggered a fierce reaction on the part of the centralist and Italian parties, which sought to have him removed from office (Paton 1867c). Paton emphasized the paradox by which the Italian element, although constituting a minority of the Dalmatian population, had succeeded in securing a majority in the provincial diet since the Italian “liberals” and centralists shared in the mutual Slavophobia (1867c). Italian activists conflated Pan-Slavist aspirations with those of Slavic-Dalmatians, which were actually very different. While Pan-Slavists looked at Serbia for the formation of an independent South-Slavic kingdom, this project did not tally either with Croat or Dalmatian aims. And Slavic-Dalmatians did not question the contribution of Italian culture to their own (thus conflating the Italian and Venetian cultures as Italian nationalist activists would do).

Paton underpinned the different feelings present within Dalmatian society, while also taking into account the existence of nationalist ferment and its destabilizing role. A few months earlier, in 1866, Paton even stated that “with regard to the sentiments of the population, there is not at the present time the slightest agitation or discontent, and I can conscientiously say that I firmly believe that Dalmatia never had a more mild or tolerant government than the present one, at any period of her history. Austria and Turkey can easily deal with their internal enemies,” he noted, “but if powerful foreign states join themselves to populations bitten by the nationality-mania, no one can predict where the catastrophe may terminate, or the area and duration of the struggle” (Paton 1866a), proving that external observers already had a clear understanding of how nationalist agitation worked and how it could infect society. More importantly, Paton explicitly touched upon the question of allegiances and “national” sentiments in what appears to bear witness not only to the limited extent of the Italian element in Dalmatia but also to the absence of actual support for the Italian cause in the eastern Adriatic, in what is a passage that is worth quoting in full:

By contrast, on the same subject Perry (1864), British consul in Venice, reported that the Austrians had “great difficulty in arming their ships, and several of their best officers [were] Swedes and Danes.” Events would soon prove Perry’s comments groundless, contrary to the reliability and competence displayed in Paton’s reports, which also showed knowledge of the ethnography and the ethno-cultural diversities of the region. In the wake of the victorious sea battle of Lissa in July 1866, when the Habsburg fleet under admiral von Tegetthoff defeated the Italian navy, Paton wrote that “the result [of the victory at Lissa] has given great satisfaction to the population of this place for several reasons. Officers chiefly Germans and partly Danish have occupied the place of the extruded and unreliable Italians in the Austrian fleet since 1848, the crews are as heretofore Dalmatian, Ragusan, Istrian, and Bocchese, and the success is felt to be a national one” (1866c). A few months later, on November 26, 1866, the various delegates to the Dalmatian diet at Zara/Zadar (1866, 314) issued a proposal that read:

Deputy Filippi (1866, 314), perhaps with the aim of belittling the Dalmatian role in the fight against Italy, retorted that

Monti (1866, 314) replied to these remarks in Slavic-Dalmatian, arguing that

Deputy Ponte (1866, 314) replied that Monti had said “to wish to talk in the Slavic language, because the proposal concerned the Dalmatians who had fought at Lissa,” misinterpreting Monti’s words and arguing that “his premise was useless because I will reply that Dalmatians who speak the Slavic language and Dalmatians who speak the Italian language fought there.” Although the Italian-speaking deputies committed to the Austrian cause, their tokens of loyalty appeared to be lukewarm; moreover, their main intent was premised on emphasizing the importance of the Italian element of Dalmatia while reducing the relevance of the prevailing Slavic component, by focusing on Prussia as the enemy and belittling the role of the battle of Lissa, which had been a crushing defeat for Italy. In the attempt to emphasize the role of Italian Dalmatians the intentions of Italian-speaking deputies appeared contradictory, possibly because of the more distinctively Germanic and Slavic nature of the army as opposed to the Latin and Slavic character of the navy. To portray Habsburg Italians as active contributors to an Italian defeat alongside Slavic crew members might well have represented an uncomfortable reality to face.

And the fact of Dalmatian loyalty to the Habsburgs was difficult to refute. Showing his excellent anthropological understanding that defied the soon-to-be prevalent national categorizations that have obtained to this day, Paton (1866a), while aware that “the glowing and concentrated Austrian patriotism of the Tyrol and Styria is not to be expected in Dalmatia […] retain[ed] the impression […] that the people of this province [we]re as well disposed to Austria as it is possible for a population of hybrid culture to be, towards a heterogeneous and artificially compacted Empire.”

Thus, he underpinned both the ethnic and cultural hybridity of Dalmatia and the fact that attachment to a multi-ethnic and diverse polity was not only possible but also a reality. Dalmatians, wishing to have an outlet in the interior of the Balkans, had long been coveting the Herzegovina and had “very little respect for the legitimate rights of the Sultan but they d[id] not wish to be a dependency of Italy” (Paton 1866a). Paton (1866a) then concluded the report summarizing the differing roles of Austria, Italy, and Serbia in the Balkans. Notwithstanding the dreadful state of Austrian finances and the limited investment in the region, “Austria as a Slavic and Roman Catholic power suit[ed] their purpose better than either an enlarged Servia with Oriental Church ascendancy or an Italian Kingdom with so powerful an obstruction of Jugo-Slavic nationality as Italy’s brilliant art and literature; social and political propaganda; and eventually culminating trade would infallibly become” (Paton 1866b). Neither Italian nor Serbian claims over the Balkans were perceived to be legitimate by Slavic Dalmatian elites, who found in the Habsburg Monarchy both an ethnic and religious accommodation that they could not find either in Orthodox Serbia or in a non-Slavic country like Italy.

Niccolò Tommaseo and Nationalist Opportunism

For his part, Tommaseo’s federalist and republican tendencies, as well as his Slavic origins, had prevented him from joining Italian anti-Slavic chauvinism well into the 1850s (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill, Patriarca and Riall2011a). Until 1848, the Dalmatian Tommaseo had been a key figure in the cultural landscape of Trieste. In the Habsburg multi-ethnic port city, he had led a group of publicists and intellectuals who, in the name of “Adriatic multinationalism,” strived to construct a common Adriatic identity under Habsburg aegis and thus bridge the gap between Italian and Slavic cultures (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012). In 1848, at the outbreak of the revolution in Venice against Habsburg rule, he joined Daniele Manin to become one of the leaders of the short-lived Venetian republic (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012). As part of these changing political allegiances, which saw him transition from Habsburg loyalty and “Adriatic multinationalism” to Venetian patriotism and, eventually, Italian irredentism, Tommaseo was initially drawn into the Illyrian movement (Milutinović Reference Milutinović1960, 121; Stojan Reference Stojan1998).

Whereas the idea of an Illyrian “nation” comprising all South Slavs had existed as a literary phenomenon since the 15th century (Stergar Reference Stergar and De Francesco2017), the idea of a Croatian state under Habsburg rule had emerged amongst Croatian elites in the late 18th century (Drakulic Reference Drakulic2008). The aspirations of the Illyrian movement in the mid-19th century were premised on the preservation of Croatia-Slavonia’s autonomy within the Habsburg Empire and the dream of a South Slav state under the Habsburgs (Greenberg Reference Greenberg, Fishman and García2011). The revolutions of 1848 boosted the popularity of the Illyrian movement, which had emerged in the previous decades, laying the foundations for Croatian national aspirations. The dominant current, advocating union with Austria, was opposed by the Party of Right, which, championing the historicity of Croatia’s rights to nationhood, fought for Croatian independence not only from Hungary but also Habsburg rule (Gross Reference Gross1973). In his anti-Austrian tendencies, Tommaseo came into direct contact with the main ideologue of the Party of Right, Eugen Kvaternik, who was living as an exile in Turin in 1859–1860 (Milutinović Reference Milutinović1960; Miculian Reference Miculian and Ghezzo2001). However, their collaboration did not last long given Kvaternik’s dream of a greater Croatia comprising Dalmatia and Istria, which also coincided with Tommaseo’s final adhesion to the Italian national cause (Milutinović Reference Milutinović1960, 147). This shift can be detected in his works appearing immediately after the end of his association with Kvaternik.

In a pamphlet addressing Vojnović’s and Gliubich’s stances on the language question, Tommaseo attacked them for being, so he believed, against Italian culture. Yet Gliubich had not alluded whatsoever to “the expulsion of Italian from [Dalmatia]; [he] only asked that the Slavic language become equal in rights to the Italian” (1861, 4). Tommaseo set the tone for subsequent anti-Slavic Italian discourse. Although he had been an early and perhaps the most authoritative proponent of Adriatic multinationalism (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012), he had also been a strenuous opponent of Habsburg rule, which Croats had fully endorsed in 1848. Yet the paradox of his “multinational” project lies in the fact that, by discussing the need for a rapprochement between the Italian and Slavic nations, he implied that the relationship between the two nations was conflictual. Therefore, his idea of the moral superiority of Italian culture over the “barbarian” Slavic and the natural opposition of the two was a logical consequence of his previous “multinationalism.” For, at the same time, “multinationalism” was premised on the existence of pre-given nations, and therefore did not leave space for the hybridity that centuries of exchanges across the Adriatic had produced before the onset of standardized national cultures. As Judson put it, “most inhabitants of such [border] regions rarely viewed themselves specifically as ‘frontier people’ or their regions as frontiers between nations” (2016, 3). On the contrary, Pacifico Valussi, among Tommaseo’s early disciples since the days of the Triestine paper La Favilla in the 1840s (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2011b), considered the region of Trieste as one of the “rings of nations,” but not binding and comprising different cultures in their mutual respect, rather as contended land. For, as he put it, “either there is conquest through arms, or peaceful colonization, or that tranquil expansion that is conducted through the assimilatory force of a dominant civilization over neighbouring nationalities” (Valussi Reference Valussi1861, 7). Valussi’s view on the future of Italo-Slavic relations radically changed in 1861 (Maritan Reference Maritan2022a), from his previous support for amicable relations between the different ethnicities of the north-eastern Adriatic, which he promoted as editor of the Triestine La Favilla in the 1840s and publisher of Il Precursore in Venice in 1848–1849 (Kirchner Reill Reference Kirchner Reill2012).

In 1861, Tommaseo’s positions with regards to Dalmatia already presented similar primordialist arguments, which would be a classic tenet of Fascist and present-day right-wing discourse, namely, the thousand-year-old Italianità of Dalmatia. He maintained that “not only there has always been an Italian Dalmatia also after the Avars [in the seventh century], but the religious, civic, and intellectual traditions of Dalmatia and Italy and their bonds of consanguinity were renewed through migrations and exiles” (Tommaseo Reference Tommaseo1861, 27). In the same year, Abbot Danilo opposed this simplistic reading of Dalmatian history, when he replied to Vincenzo Duplancich’s bold claims that there was no Slavic civilization in Dalmatia and that “the Italian race […] was the first to inhabit the country” (1861, 4–5). Danilo noted that Duplancich considered as Italian not only Roman civilization but also the pre-Roman peoples of the Italian peninsula, such as the Etruscans. Yet he too transplanted contemporary categories of “nation” to the past by arguing that Slavic Dalmatians descended from the original Illyric population of the region, pre-dating the Roman conquest (Danilo Reference Danilo1861, 9).

It was amid these essentialist notions of ethnicity and culture that nationalist ideologies eventually gained traction, proving to be a fertile soil for the final takeover of aggressive nationalisms. Yet there were still several local intellectuals who raised the level of the debate, such as abbot Gliubich, whose non-essentialist understanding of ethnicities and cultural exchanges drew Tommaseo’s harsh criticisms. The more nuanced understandings of history and culture offered by several Slavic-Dalmatian intellectuals not only failed to obtain among Italian speakers of the time, but also struggle to be integral part of historiographical research nowadays. For the trope of Slavic-Italian enmity and the centuries-old Italian presence in Dalmatia originating from Roman times and perpetuated by Venetian domination, views that Tommaseo’s fame was instrumental in legitimizing still dominate.

It was Italian publicists such as Tommaseo who fueled animosity by accusing Slavs of what they had no intention of doing. “Quash the Italians,” he warned Slavic-Dalmatians, “and you will do no harm to Italy but to yourselves” (Tommaseo Reference Tommaseo1861, 34). In a sectarian verve that one seldom finds in Slavic-Dalmatian papers of the 1860s, Tommaseo went on in the glorification of Italian culture, on the basis of which all European culture originated and without which, he stressed, the Dalmatian would not exist (1861). Yet value was not a question put forward by Slavic intellectuals and politicians, for they were not against Italian culture per se but its hegemonic role in public life. Part and parcel of Tommaseo’s rhetoric was what Antonio Gramsci, during Italy’s Fascist period, described as the Italian nationalist “desire to appear as heir to the ancient world” (Reference Gramsci1967, 30). Tommaseo’s pamphlet was characterized by the defining features of the Italian nationalist mentality analyzed by Gramsci, that is “that particular sectarianism […] which manifests itself in a certain mania of persecution, in thinking to be always ill-judged […], to be victims of international plots, to have particular historical rights unrecognized and infringed upon” (Reference Gramsci1967, 58). And these features can be taken as exemplifying the phenomenon of nationalism across time and space, from Kemalist Turkey and Nazi Germany to Xi Jinping’s China and Putin’s Russia; hence the comparative relevance that Italian nationalism and its claims over the eastern Adriatic have for the study of nationalist politics today, in particular in the context of the convergence of nationalist ideologies and real or supposed “fifth columns” (Mylonas and Radnitz Reference Mylonas, Radnitz, Mylonas and Radnitz2022a, Reference Mylonas and Radnitz2022b).