¹ Bellasich is a well-known figure in the local histories of mid-twentieth-century Fiume, especially regarding Gabriele D'Annunzio's occupation of the city and the Italian nationalist campaigns that overtook the town throughout the interwar. Ljubinka Toševa-Karpowicz has written most widely on his background and importance, especially in: Toševa-Karpowicz, Ljubinka, D'Annunzio u Rijeci: mitovi, politika i uloga masonerije (Rijeka: Izdavački centar Sušak, 2007)Google Scholar; Toševa-Karpowicz, Ljubinka, Masonerija, Politika I Rijeka: (1785.–1944.) (Rijeka: Državni arhiv u Rijeci, 2015)Google Scholar with its English translation, Toševa-Karpowicz, Ljubinka, Freemasonry, Politics and Rijeka (1785–1944) (Washington, DC: Westphalia Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

² For context on Fiume's position in post-1918 international settlements, Italian national ambitions and how and why Fiume became a Free State in the early interwar period, see Reill, Dominique Kirchner, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020)Google Scholar; Pupo, Raoul, Fiume città di passione (Rome: Laterza, 2018)Google Scholar.

³ For a useful historiographical survey of the history of Mussolini's last fascist state, the Italian Social Republic (RSI), also known as Salò, see: Rovatti, Toni, ‘Linee di ricerca sulla Repubblica Sociale Italiana’, Studi Storici 55, no. 1 (2014): 287–9Google Scholar9.

⁴ There is a growing amount of work examining how Italian nationalist policies and capitalist pursuits (spearheaded in part by Bellasich) worked together in Fiume/Rijeka, putting ever more people at risk. For example, see: Reill, Dominique Kirchner, Jeličić, Ivan, and Rolandi, Francesca, ‘Redefining Citizenship after Empire: The Rights to Welfare, to Work, and to Remain in a Post-Habsburg World’, Journal of Modern History 94, no. 2 (2022): 326–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See especially the work of Ivan Jeličić – whose research focuses on the socialist organisations in Fiume in the first half of the twentieth century – and Francesca Rolandi – who pays special attention to the questions of gender, work and nationalism. Jeličić, Ivan, ‘Uz stogodišnjicu rijeckog Radnickog vijeca. Klasna alternativa nacionalnim državama na sutonu Monarhije’, Časopis za povijest Zapadne Hrvatske 12 (2017): 63–85Google Scholar; Ivan Jeličić, ‘Nell'ombra dell'autonomismo. Il movimento socialista a Fiume, 1901–1921’ (PhD thesis, Università degli studi di Trieste, 2016); Ivan Jeličić, ‘La parabola del socialismo adriatico’, Qualestoria, no. 1 (2020): 169–76; Jeličić, Ivan, ‘Repubblica con chi? Il movimento socialista fiumano e il giallo Sisa nel contesto post-asburgico fiumano’, Qualestoria, no. 2 (2020): 73–93Google Scholar; Rolandi, Francesca, ‘Female Public Employees during a Post-Imperial Transition: Gender, Politics and Labour in Fiume after the First World War’, Contemporary European History (2022): 1–14Google Scholar; Rolandi, Francesca, ‘Un trionfo mai richiesto? Partecipazione politica femminile e rappresentazioni di genere nella stampa locale di Fiume e Sušak dopo la Grande guerra’, Italia contemporanea 293 (2020): 73–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar with the English translation available at: Rolandi, Francesca, ‘A Never Requested Triumph? Reframing Gender Boundaries in Fiume and Sušak after 1918’, Italia Contemporanea Yearbook (2020): 11–36Google Scholar.

⁵ All information on the corruption case brought against Bellasich is taken from: Državni Arhiv u Rijeci: 53, Kabinet Osnaka a-1, Osobni dosej: Bellasich Salvatore.

⁶ This legal formula is used throughout citizenship/divorce applications in Fiume from 1922 onward. More on this will be provided later in the article, but examples can be easily found throughout the application files held in: Državni Arhiv u Rijeci: 541 Općina Rijeka, Izdvojenji predmeti, Odustajanje i prihvačanje riječke zavičajnosti, 1923.

⁷ ‘Golden passports’ denote opportunities for individuals to obtain citizenship (and therefore access to a state's laws) purely based on monetary investment. For an absolutely fascinating study of all the different kinds of golden passport situations besetting the twenty-first century world, see: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2015). For a country-by-country analysis of European countries offering citizenship rights in return for substantial capital investment, see: Laure Brillaud and Maíra Martini, European Getaway: Inside the Murky World of Golden Visas (Berlin: Transparency International, 2018).

⁸ An excellent overview of what ‘migratory divorce’ means and how geographical proximity to different legal systems encourages the practice is available here when discussing US family laws: Michael J. Higdon, ‘If You Grant It, They Will Come: The History and Enduring Legal Legacy of Migratory Divorce’, Utah Law Review (University of Tennessee Legal Studies Research Paper No. 408) (2020).

⁹ In the early twentieth century, places like Mexico, Cuba and Reno, Nevada, became well-known capitals for quickie divorces. See Bergeson, Rollo, ‘The Divorce Mill Advertises’, Law and Contemporary Problems 2, no. 3 (1935): 348–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent study of how a migratory divorce regime was transformed by local actors into a divorce mill industry, see: Barber, Alicia, Reno's Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Before 1900, in the Protestant areas of the German Empire, divorces and remarriages were relatively easy to get if a man was seeking a divorce but almost impossible for a woman to obtain because of how paternalistic residency laws were upheld. See: Neschwara, Christian, ‘Eherecht und “Scheinmigration” im 19. Jahrhundert: Siebenbürgische und ungarische, deutsche und Coburger Ehen’, BRGÖ (Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs) 2, no. 1 (2012): 107Google Scholar.

¹¹ Much interesting work is starting to come out about how Jewish and Muslim divorces functioned within Habsburg lands. See especially: Lois C. Dubin, ‘Jewish Women, Marriage Law, and Emancipation: A Civil Divorce in Late-Eighteenth-Century Trieste’, Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 2 (2007): 65–92; Sándor Nagy, ‘Family Formation, Ethnicity, Divorce, and Marriage Law: Jewish Divorces in Hungary, 1786–1914’, Hungarian Historical Review 8, no. 4 (2019): 812–42; Ninja Bumann, ‘Contesting Juridical Authority: Sharia, Marriage, and Morality in Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Austrian History Yearbook 53 (2022): 150–68.

¹² For an excellent analysis of the ‘Culture Wars’ between the Catholic Church and the Habsburg state around family laws and divorce, see Ulrike Harmat, ‘“Till Death Do You Part”: Catholicism, Marriage and Culture War in Austria(-Hungary)’, in Marriage, Law and Modernity: Global Histories, ed. Julia Moses (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018): 109–28; Ulrike Harmat, ‘Divorce and Remarriage in Austria-Hungary: The Second Marriage of Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf’, Austrian History Yearbook 32 (2001): 69–103.

¹³ For an excellent discussion of how the dualist Austro-Hungarian state came about and how it worked, see: Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), esp. 259–68.

¹⁴ There is one notable exception to this, however. Though part of the Habsburg-Hungarian Kingdom, the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia retained its internal legal autonomy and kept the Austrian Civil Code of 1811 (which had been formerly introduced in Croatia-Slavonia only in 1852). Croatia-Slavonia before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary included much of today's Croatia, though not Istria, Fiume/Rijeka, Međimurje, or Dalmatia. This meant that while in Habsburg Hungary divorce was available to converted Catholics after 1867, in Habsburg-Hungarian Croatia-Slavonia it was still illegal for Catholics to divorce, as was the case for the other Austrian-controlled parts of today's Croatia. For English-language discussions of the particularities of autonomous Croatian legal practices within the Habsburg Hungarian kingdom, especially as it related to citizenship questions and inheritance practices, see: Ivan Kosnica, ‘Hungarians and Citizenship in Croatia-Slavonia 1868–1918’, ATINER'S Conference Paper Series, No: LAW2014-1355, 2015: 4–13; Ivan Kosnica, ‘Local Citizenship in the Croatian-Slavonian Legal Area in the First Yugoslavia (1918–1941): Breakdown of a Concept?’, in Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism, Vol. II: Public Law, eds. Michał Gałędek and Anna Klimaszewska (Leiden: Brill, 2020): 171–91; Mirela Krešić, ‘Intestate Succession of Female Descendants According to the Austrian General Civil Code in the Croatian-Slavonian Legal Area, 1853–1946’, Belgrade Law Review LVIII, no. 3 (2010): 121–36. For a fascinating discussion of the problems of creating a unified family law in interwar Yugoslavia because of the different legal regimes of Croatia-Slavonia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia/Dalmatia and Montenegro, see: Mirela Krešić, ‘Much Ado About Nothing: Debates on the Type of Marriage in Yugoslavia between the Two World Wars’, in Kulturkampf um die Ehe: Reform des europäischen Eherechts nach dem Großen Krieg, ed. Martin Löhnig (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 199–202.

¹⁵ For more information on changing Hungarian citizenship and family law practices after 1867, see: Anna Loutfi, ‘The Family as a Site of Cultural Autonomy and Freedom: Anxieties in Legal Debates over State Regulation of Marriage in Hungary, 1867–1895’, Women's History Review 20, no. 4 (2011): 599–613; Eszter Cs. Herger, ‘The Introduction of Secular Divorce Law in Hungary, 1895–1918: Social and Legal Consequences for Women’, Journal on European History of Law, no. 2 (2012): 138–48; Norbert Varga, ‘The Framing of the First Hungarian Citizenship Law (Act 50 of 1879) and the Acquisition of Citizenship’, Hungarian Studies 18, no. 2 (2004): 127–53; Robert Nemes, ‘The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary’, in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 313–35; Moritz Csáky, Der Kulturkampf in Ungarn. Die Kirchenpolitische Gesetzgebung der Jahre 1894/95 (Graz: Böhlau, 1967).

¹⁶ Sándor Nagy, ‘One Empire, Two States, Many Laws: Matrimonial Law and Divorce in the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy’, The Hungarian Historical Review 3, no. 1 (2014): 190–221.

¹⁷ ‘Transylvanian marriages’ or ‘Siebenbürgen Ehen’ were divorces processed through Transylvania's capital, Cluj, and they were quite well-known in the late nineteenth century among people who followed the newspapers. In the historiography of the late Habsburg Empire, they are also fairly well-known, with some of the most important works analysing the phenomenon, including: Harmat, ‘Divorce and Remarriage’; Neschwara, ‘Eherecht’; Sándor Nagy, ‘Osztrák válások erdélyben 1868–1895: Otto Wagner ‘erdélyi házassága’, FONS XIV, no. 3 (2007): 359–428; Sándor Nagy, ‘Indivisibiliter ac inseparabiliter? Österreichische Scheidungen in Klausenburg (1868–1895). Otto Wagners Siebenbürger Ehe’, in Studien zur Wiener Geschichte, ed. Karl Fischer (Vienna: Jahrbuch des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 2018): 75–157.

¹⁸ The historiography of Transylvania and the national conflicts surrounding it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is vast and has had significant implications in methodological approaches to the studies of nationalism, administration, diplomacy, culture, and gender beyond the region as well. Some of the most well-known titles include: Rogers Brubaker, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Gábor Egry, ‘Wie Siebenbürgen verschwand? Ungarn, Rumänien und der “Transsilvanismus”’, Die Europäische Rundschau, no. 2 (2020): 45–51; Gábor Egry, ‘Navigating the Straits: Changing Borders, Changing Rules and Practices of Ethnicity and Loyalty in Romania after 1918’, The Hungarian Historical Review 2, no. 3 (2013): 449–76; Gábor Egry, ‘Unholy Alliances? Language Exams, Loyalty, and Identification in Interwar Romania’, Slavic Review 76, no. 4 (2017): 959–82; Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).

¹⁹ For an excellent discussion about the importance of the region's multi-religiosity, and Unitarianism in particular, see Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, ‘God is the New Church: The Ethnicization of Religion’, in Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern, 157–80.

²⁰ Harmat, ‘Divorce and Remarriage’, 80–81.

²¹ Nagy, ‘Osztrák’, 360; Harmat, ‘“Till Death”’, 114.

²² We have no exact total number for those Austrian Catholics who converted to Unitarianism to obtain a Transylvanian marriage, but Sándor Nagy estimates that between 1868 and 1895 it was about 226, though these numbers reflect only ‘divorced marriages’ validated, not divorces themselves, and identifying who was ‘Austrian’ or not remains difficult. Nagy, ‘Osztrák’, 373; Nagy, ‘Indivisibiliter’, 83.

²³ Margarete Grandner and Ulrike Harmat, ‘Begrenzt verliebt. Gesetzliche Ehehindernisse und die Grenze zwischen Österreich und Ungarn’, in Liebe und Widerstand. Ambivalenzen historischer Geschlechterbeziehungen, eds. Ingrid Bauer, Christa Hämmerle and Gabriella Hauch (Vienna: L'Homme Schriften, 2005): 287–304; Nagy, ‘Osztrák’, 378–89.

²⁴ Neschwara, ‘Eherecht’, 105.

²⁵ The following summary of Nagy's work uses the two pieces he published in Hungarian and German: Nagy, ‘Indivisibiliter’; Nagy, ‘Osztrák’.

²⁶ Otto Wagner is considered the leading representative of the architectural side of the Vienna Secession movement and is most directly identified with the Art Nouveau style typified not just in Viennese buildings and urban planning but also throughout all the Habsburg lands. For more on him, see: Carl E. Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981); August Sarnitz, Otto Wagner: 1841–1918. Wegbereiter der modernen Architektur (Köln: Taschen, 2005).

²⁷ Harmat, ‘“Till Death”’, 114. Apparently, a satirical play by Valery Grey was also staged in 1911 on ‘Transylvanian marriages’ and was performed in the Workers’ Home in the Viennese district of Favoriten. The play is about a married couple accused of bigamy. Harmat, ‘Divorce and Remarriage’, 84.

²⁸ Nagy, ‘Osztrák’, 394–5.

²⁹ Michael Pammer, ‘Economic Growth and Lower Class Investments in Nineteenth Century Austria’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 25, no. 1 (2000): 30.

³⁰ In Habsburg Hungary and Austria (as was the case in most of Europe), citizenship was determined by the male head-of-household, and therefore only men could adopt someone to provide them with the opportunities for citizenship acquisition. For a fascinating discussion of what the gender implications of household/citizenship regulations had on the liberal, individual-rights-oriented Habsburg civil codes of the nineteenth century, see: Jana Osterkamp, ‘Familie, Macht, Differenz. Familienrecht(e) in der Habsburgermonarchie als Herausforderung des Empire’, L'Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 31, no. 1 (2020): 17–34.

³¹ Another reason why adoption proved the easiest way to obtain citizenship was because adoption immediately also provided ‘Heimatrecht’ or pertinency, which was a special Habsburg legal category in between domicile and state citizenship. For more on this see: Reill, Jeličić, and Rolandi, ‘Redefining Citizenship’; Pieter M. Judson, ‘Citizenship without Nation? Political and Social Citizenship in the Habsburg Empire’, Contemporanea XXI, no. 4 (2018): 633–46.

³² Harmat, ‘Divorce and Remarriage’, 87; Neschwara, ‘Eherecht’, 107.

³³ Harmat, ‘Divorce and Remarriage’, 88.

³⁴ Nagy, ‘Osztrák’, 378–88.

³⁵ Fiume's relationship to Habsburg Hungarian family law, marriage law and divorce law before 1918 was intense. Locals either willingly accepted the reforms and celebrated Hungary's modern state system or rejected its attack on the Catholic Church's authority to protect the family. For more on this see: Péter Techet, Umkämpfte Kirche: Innerkatholische Konflikte im österreichisch-ungarischen Küstenland 1890–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021); Péter Techet, ‘Verzahnung kirchen- und nationalpolitischer Frontlinien in Fiume/Rijeka: “Liberale” Ungarn und Italiener zur Zeit des ungarischen “Kulturkampfes” (1894/1895)’, in Österreich-Ungarns imperiale Herausforderungen: Nationalismen und Rivalitäten im Habsburgerreich um 1900, eds. Bernhard Bachinger, Wolfram Dornik and Stephan Lehnstaedt (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2020): 295–312.

³⁶ The archival holdings of divorces processed in Fiume is incomplete, with much missing from the period of 1923–4. The author's own research confirms the figures provided here and below in Nenad Hlača, ‘Razvod braka u Rijeci početkom 20. Stoljeća’, Zbornik Pravnog fakulteta u Rijeci 8 (1987): 12–14.

³⁷ ‘National Marriage and Divorce Rate Trends’, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022 (accessed 29 Apr. 2023).

³⁸ ‘La Corte d'Appello di Firenze e l'industria fiumana dei divorzi’, La Difesa (Fiume), 19 Mar. 1923.

³⁹ Giuseppe Parlato, Mezzo secolo di Fiume. Economia e società a Fiume nella prima metà del Novecento (Siena: Cantagalli, 2009).

⁴⁰ For an absolutely fascinating book analysing the long history of legal battles in Italy around the question of introducing divorce from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, see: Mark Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860–1974 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

⁴¹ The 80-20 principle, also known as the Pareto Principle, argues that 80 per cent of outcomes derive from 20 per cent of causes, or in layman's terms, 80 per cent of wealth usually resides with 20 per cent of a population. Joseph A. Schumpeter, ‘Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923)’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 63, no. 2 (1949): 147–73; Norberto Bobbio, On Mosca and Pareto (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1972). Renato Cirillo, ‘Was Vilfredo Pareto Really a “Precursor” of Fascism?’, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 42, no. 2 (1983): 235–45. For a fascinating new analysis of Pareto's theories regarding global systems, see: Emanuela Susca, ‘Vilfredo Pareto's Contribution to a Sociology of Globalization’, in Classical Sociology Beyond Methodological Nationalism, ed. Massimo Pendenza (Boston: Brill, 2014): 65–89.

⁴² Vilfredo Pareto, Maffeo Pantaleoni and Gabriele De Rosa, Lettere a Maffeo Pantaleoni, 1890–1923, 3 vols. (Rome: Librairie Droz, 1960), vol. 3, 303.

⁴³ Alessandrina Bakunin was related to the famous anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, but their connection was not close. She lived mostly in Italy, where her father, Modesto, served as a consul in Venice. For more on the Bakunin family, see: John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).

⁴⁴ Tommaso Giacalone–Monaco, ‘Pareto e la Bakounine’, Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia 18, no. 3/4 (1959): 194.

⁴⁵ For more on citizenship and the possibilities for divorce in late imperial Russia, see: Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Barbara Alpern Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Gregory L. Freeze, ‘Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia’, in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, eds. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007): 146–78; Gregory L. Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760–1860’, The Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4 (1990): 709–46.

⁴⁶ For details of the Pareto-Bakunin court cases, see: Giacalone–Monaco, ‘Pareto’.

⁴⁷ Giovanni Busino, ‘Materiali per l'edizione dell'epistolario. Lettere del Pareto a Jeanne Régis’, Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto 1, no. 2 (1963): 274. This article has the most in-depth information about the Pareto-Régis relationship. For an absolutely fascinating ‘look’ at what Pareto's domestic life was like in Villa Angora with Régis, see: Manon Michels Einaudi, ‘Pareto as I Knew Him’, Atlantic Monthly 156 (1935): 336–46.

⁴⁸ Pareto, Pantaleoni and De Rosa, Lettere, 288.

⁴⁹ ‘Wages and Hours of Labor’, Monthly Labor Review 21, no. 4 (1925): 67–8.

⁵⁰ Pareto, Pantaleoni, and De Rosa, Lettere, 304.

⁵¹ For two other articles useful in examining Pareto's divorce case in Fiume, see: Giovanni Busino, ‘Vilfredo Pareto, cittadino fiumano’, Fiume 3, no. October (1983): 83–6; Ester Capuzzo, ‘Il divorzio nel primo dopoguerra: il “caso fiumano”’, in Dall'Austria all'Italia: Aspetti istituzionali e problemi normativi nella storia di una frontiera (Rome: La Fenice, 1996): 121–48.

⁵² In Pareto's applications for citizenship and divorce proceedings, he lists the address of Bellasich's law offices as via Cavour 8. Almost all of Bellasich's Italian divorce clients listed this same address. It goes without saying they did not live together in his offices, but most likely they paid to use Bellasich's address for their legal domicile. A review of all the immediate postwar divorce cases show that most lawyers listed their offices’ addresses as their clients’ domicile, with Bellasich representing one of the two spouses in most cases.

⁵³ Busino, ‘Materiali’, 303.

⁵⁴ Pareto, Pantaleoni, and De Rosa, Lettere, 319. In another letter, on p. 305 he writes: ‘for the divorce, you don't need to change citizenship in Fiume. Is that true or am I mistaken?’

⁵⁵ For a very useful synthesis of the different international private law conferences and how they dealt with marriage and divorce, see: Kurt Lipstein, ‘One Hundred Years of Hague Conferences on Private International Law’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1993): 553–653.

⁵⁶ Giacalone–Monaco, ‘Pareto e la Bakounine’.

⁵⁷ Interestingly, apparently Transylvanian divorce procedures in the areas annexed by post-1918 Romania proceeded with a similar standardisation of legal procedures around abandonment, where spouses looking to divorce used the abandonment cause in an almost formulaic manner, rendering the courts little more than receptacles for divorce petitions. See George P. Docan, Pentru unificare: Legislatia ungara din Transilvania in comparatie cu legislatia romana (Bucharest: Editura Tipografiei ‘Curierul Judiciar’, 1921), 39–43. For more information on postimperial legal practices in successor state Romania, see Francesco Magno, ‘Diritto e giustizia nella grande Romania. Eredità imperiali, nazionalismo, State-Building (1919–1927)’ (PhD thesis, Università di Trento, 2021).

⁵⁸ For an excellent detailed explanation about why the Florentine courts rejected Pareto's divorce, see Capuzzo, ‘Il divorzio’.

⁵⁹ ‘La Corte d'Appello di Firenze e l'industria fiumana dei divorzi’, La Difesa (Fiume), 19 Mar. 1923.

⁶⁰ There's an entire file containing scores of these notarised authorisations for the revocation of citizenship once divorces were finalised. They can be found at Državni Arhiv u Rijeci, 541 Općina Rijeka, Izdvojenji predmeti, Odustajanje i prihvačanje riječke zavičajnosti, 1923.

⁶¹ Emile Lengyel and Fiume Secretary General of the Legal Government of Fiume Kraljevica, ‘Petition sent to the Parliament and Senate of the Kingdom of Italy by a considerable number of citizens of Fiume, citing the implementation of the International Treaty of Rapallo’, 10 Aug. 1923, League of Nations Secretariat; Political Section; Registry files (1919–1927): R559-11-1348-30348, League of Nations Archive.

⁶² Janko de Bedeković, 16 Oct. 1922, Državni Arhiv u Rijeci, 541 Općina Rijeka, Izdvojenji predmeti, Odustajanje i prihvačanje riječke zavičajnosti, 1923.

⁶³ Capuzzo, ‘Il divorzio’.

⁶⁴ The list of Fiume's divorce customers is quite astounding once you start looking through the files, including celebrities such as the inventor Guglielmo Marconi, the cinema actor Annibale Ninchi, the colonial architect Saul Meraviglia Mantegazza, and one of Italy's richest bankers, Prince Alessandro Torlonia, just to name a few. Quite a large number of rich and noble women from Rome, Milan, Venice and Florence also appear throughout the entire period suing for divorce against their husbands. For more details about how Marconi approached his divorce and change of citizenship see: Raboy, Marc, Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 522–6Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Vanessa Ogle's new work on postimperial states’ availability to monetize sovereignty in aid of companies and individuals navigating post-1945 global capitalism is opening up new roads into understanding the anchored qualities of today's neoliberalism. See: Ogle, Vanessa, ‘“Funk Money”: The End of Empires, the Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event’, Past & Present 249, no. 1 (2020): 213–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ogle, Vanessa, ‘State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order” and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–1980’, Humanity 5, no. 2 (2014): 211–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Zahra, Tara, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023)Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Slobodian, Quinn, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2023)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Siegelberg, Mira L., Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.