Etikett: Av: Chiara Gelmini

For generations, Istria was the holiday people returned to without a second thought. As prices rise, that familiarity faces a new test: what makes a place worth coming back to?

By Chiara Gelmini

I grew up in Trieste, a city in north-eastern Italy at the northern end of the Adriatic, only a few kilometres from the Slovenian border, where Istria has always occupied a peculiar place in people’s lives: unmistakably across a border, yet never entirely foreign. For much of the twentieth century, crossing that border was anything but casual. After the Second World War, the area around Trieste was divided between Allied-administered Zone A and Yugoslav-administered Zone B, while the post-war settlement was accompanied by the Istrian exodus, before the border arrangement was stabilised in 1954. Yet the land beyond it remained deeply familiar — through language, food, shared habits and family histories that long predated the political lines drawn across the region.

Istria is therefore not only part of Trieste’s geography of summer, but of its family geography too: many people from Trieste have parents, grandparents or earlier generations who were born there. And this culture of return extends far beyond Trieste. For generations, Croatians, Slovenians, Italians, Germans, Austrians and visitors from further north in Europe have made parts of the peninsula their second summer home, often returning to the same village, campsite, apartment or stretch of coast year after year.