Monfalcone

From the shipyards of Monfalcone come the largest cruise ships in the world: the shipbuilding tradition began in April 1908, when the Cosulich family opened the Cantiere Navale Triestino, and within a few years the town changed shape, growing from a few thousand people into a working-class centre that drew skilled hands from half of Europe. The MuCa shipbuilding museum tells that story today inside the former workers' village of Panzano, built in 1929 to house that same workforce. Above, the Rocca guards the first step of the Karst plateau, and it was right there, in June 1915, that the town entered the war: for two years it stayed on the front line of the Isonzo front, a target for Austro-Hungarian artillery, until between 1917 and 1918 it was almost razed to the ground. The population, which before the war had come close to eleven thousand, collapsed to a few thousand.

The Second World War brought another occupation, and the end another race: on the first of May 1945 the town was reached by Yugoslav troops in the race for Trieste, and that same evening the New Zealanders arrived too, coming from the Veneto. Monfalcone stayed under Yugoslav administration for a few weeks, then passed to the Allies, and only in 1947 returned definitively to Italy. After the war many communist shipyard workers, disappointed by the break between Tito and the Cominform, emigrated to Yugoslavia and often met a tragic fate; the gap was filled by refugees from Istria and Fiume. Today the Karst is a memory of trenches, and the beach at Marina Julia and the bay of Panzano look towards Trieste, half an hour away by train.