Muggia

At Muggia they used to speak a language nobody speaks any more. It was called muglisano, a Ladin tongue akin to Friulian, and at the end of the nineteenth century it died out. The last testimonies were collected in 1889 by the abbot Jacopo Cavalli, who went looking for those who still knew it; his most reliable source was Niccolò Bortoloni, the last of the muglisani, who died at the beginning of 1898. For a long time, before disappearing, that language had lived side by side with the other, the Istro-Venetian muggesano still spoken today: two tongues in the same mouth, until one of them stopped. Muggia is the southernmost comune of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and is, with San Dorligo della Valle, the only strip of Istria left to Italy; from the western tips of the promontory one can watch the sun set into the Adriatic, which in Italy happens in very few places.

The settlement too has changed place. The first nucleus was a protohistoric hill fort on the hill now called Muggia Vecchia, later a Roman camp; the name appears for the first time in a document of 931, when the kings of Italy Hugh and Lothair gave the Castellum Mugla to the patriarch of Aquileia. At the end of the fifteenth century, however, the people came down to the sea, and the centre moved to where it stands now. Under the Habsburgs came the shipyards, and from a town of fishermen and small coastal trade Muggia became a working-class town; from that tradition came also the Istrian Resistance, with the names of Alma Vivoda, Natale Colarich and Luigi Frausin, and the silver medal for military valour. In October 1954, with the settlement of the borders, the comune lost a third of its territory and its eastern hamlets, and more than two thousand seven hundred people left their houses to move to Italy.