Province of Spalato (Italian : Provincia di Spalato) was a province of the Italian Governorate of Dalmatia, created in May 1941 during World War II (by the "Regio Decreto Legge del 18 maggio 1941" [1] ). It lasted until September 1943.
Province of Spalato (Italian : Provincia di Spalato) was a province of the Italian Governorate of Dalmatia, created in May 1941 during World War II (by the "Regio Decreto Legge del 18 maggio 1941" [1] ). It lasted until September 1943.
The puppet Independent State of Croatia ceded by the Treaties of Rome of 18 May 1941, extensive Adriatic coastal areas to the Fascist Kingdom of Italy. The ruling Italian National Fascist Party was a patron of Croatian fascist Ustasha Movement. Italy placed Ustasha leader Ante Pavelić as the head of Croatian puppet State after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the April War 1941. Among the ceded areas was the city of Split in Dalmatia.
Italy created some provinces (administrative districts) in that region, that lasted until September 1943. One was the province of Spalato. The administrative capital was the city of Spalato (Italian name for Split). [2]
The province had an area of 1,075 square kilometers and a population of 128,000 inhabitants. Most of the province's inhabitants were Croats, but there were more than 3,000 Dalmatian Italians (in Split alone there were over 1,000 in 1940, even if very few in number compared to the mid-19th century, when they were over a third of the city's inhabitants). [3] The island of Lastovo, ceded after World War I to Italy and renamed Lagosta, was united to the province.
The Italians started immediately a process of improvement in the underdeveloped area, creating needed infrastructures from hospitals to schools and sewages.
Between 1941 and 1943 the governor of Dalmatia, Giuseppe Bastianini, sent tens of thousands of tons of food to Dalmatia, for a monthly value of 13 million lire at the time (over eight million euros today). In the new provinces there was no health organization worthy of the name and schools were almost non-existent. The Italian government established 27 medical clinics in the region entrusted to medical officers of the Royal Army, even making numerous midwives arrive from the Peninsula and establishing an itinerant health service, on trucks and motorboats, which carries out thousands of visits. The reclamation of 76,000 hectares of land and an agrarian reform were even started (for the Italian one it will be necessary to wait for 1950) which in the spring of 1942 had already registered the requests of 22,000 Slavic peasants for access to the benefits provided by law. Over a thousand teachers were recruited for the schools, 531 of whom were Italian and in 1941 over 260 Dalmatian students (211 of whom were Croatian) received scholarships for universities in the Kingdom of Italy. Fabrizio Gregorutti
Under orders of Mussolini, it was also started in July 1941 a process of forced Italianization (related to the history of Venetian Dalmatia [4] ).
Because of this, in the end of summer 1941 there was a resistance movement of Croats against the Italian conquest, but without huge consequences until spring/summer 1943.
Furthermore, in spring 1942 was created the football team Associazione Calcio Spalato, that was ruled by the Italian FIGC in the Italian championships.
Meanwhile, in 1941 and 1942 many Jews and some Serbs took refuge in the city, escaping from the nearby regions ruled by the Croatian Ustaše.
In September 1943 the German army took control of the region from the Italians, who had surrendered to the Allies, and soon started a terrible guerrilla war between the German occupiers and Josip Broz Tito's partisans. The province was cancelled in the same September and later annexed to Ante Pavelić's puppet Croatia.
The 13 comuni were (first in Italian the official name and then in Croatian the actual)::
Dalmatia is one of the four historical regions of Croatia, alongside Central Croatia, Slavonia and Istria, located on the east shore of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia.
The provinces of Italy are the second-level administrative divisions of the Italian Republic, on an intermediate level between a municipality and a region. Since 2015, provinces have been classified as "institutional bodies of second level".
The Independent State of Croatia was a World War II-era puppet state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It was established in parts of occupied Yugoslavia on 10 April 1941, after the invasion by the Axis powers. Its territory consisted of most of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as some parts of modern-day Serbia and Slovenia, but also excluded many Croat-populated areas in Dalmatia, Istria, and Međimurje regions.
Prince Aimone, 4th Duke of Aosta was a prince of Italy's reigning House of Savoy and an officer of the Royal Italian Navy. The second son of Prince Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Aosta he was granted the title Duke of Spoleto on 22 September 1904. He inherited the title Duke of Aosta on 3 March 1942 following the death of his brother Prince Amedeo, in a British prisoner of war camp in Nairobi.
Italian irredentism was a political movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Italy with irredentist goals which promoted the unification of geographic areas in which indigenous peoples were considered to be ethnic Italians. At the beginning, the movement promoted the annexation to Italy of territories where Italians formed the absolute majority of the population, but retained by the Austrian Empire after the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866. During World War I the main "irredent lands" were considered to be the provinces of Trento and Trieste and, in a narrow sense, irredentists referred to the Italian patriots living in these two areas.
Province of Cattaro was a province of the Italian Governorate of Dalmatia, created in May 1941 during World War II. It lasted until September 1943.
The History of Dalmatia concerns the history of the area that covers eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea and its inland regions, from the 2nd century BC up to the present day.
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The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus was the post-World War II exodus and departure of local ethnic Italians as well as ethnic Slovenes, Croats, and Istro-Romanians from Yugoslavia. The emigrants, who had lived in the now Yugoslav territories of the Julian March, Kvarner and Dalmatia, largely went to Italy, but some joined the Italian diaspora in the Americas, Australia and South Africa. These regions were ethnically mixed, with long-established historic Croatian, Italian, and Slovene communities. After World War I, the Kingdom of Italy annexed Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and parts of Dalmatia including the city of Zadar. At the end of World War II, under the Allies' Treaty of Peace with Italy, the former Italian territories in Istria, Kvarner, the Julian March and Dalmatia were assigned to the nation of Yugoslavia, except for the Province of Trieste. The former territories absorbed into Yugoslavia are part of present-day Croatia and Slovenia.
Dalmatian Italians are the historical Italian national minority living in the region of Dalmatia, now part of Croatia and Montenegro.
The Governorate of Dalmatia was a territory divided into three provinces of Italy during the Italian Kingdom and Italian Empire epoch. It was created later as an entity in April 1941 at the start of World War II in Yugoslavia, by uniting the existing Province of Zara together with occupied Yugoslav territory annexed by Italy after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers and the signing of the Rome Treaties.
Italy–Yugoslavia relations are the cultural and political relations between Italy and Yugoslavia in the 20th century, since the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 until its dissolution in 1992. Relations during the interwar years were hostile because of Italian irredentist demands to Yugoslav territory, leading to Fascist Italy and the Axis Powers invading Yugoslavia during World War II. After lingering tensions after the war over the status of the Free Territory of Trieste, relations improved during the Cold War.
Split ; historically known as Spalato ; see other names) is the second-largest city of Croatia after the capital Zagreb, the largest city in Dalmatia and the largest city on the Croatian coast. It lies on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea and is spread over a central peninsula and its surroundings. An intraregional transport hub and popular tourist destination, the city is linked to the Adriatic islands and the Apennine Peninsula. More than 900,000 tourists visit Split each year.
The Autonomist Party was an Italian-Dalmatianist political party in the Dalmatian political scene, that existed for around 70 years of the 19th century and until World War I. Its goal was to maintain the autonomy of the Kingdom of Dalmatia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as opposed to the unification with the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. The Autonomist Party has been accused of secretly having been a pro-Italian movement due to their defense of the rights of ethnic Italians in Dalmatia. The Autonomist Party did not claim to be an Italian movement, and indicated that it sympathized with a sense of heterogeneity amongst Dalmatians in opposition to ethnic nationalism. In the 1861 elections, the Autonomists won twenty-seven seats in Dalmatia, while Dalmatia's Croatian nationalist movement, the National Party, won only fourteen seats. This number rapidly decreased: already in 1870 autonomists lost their majority in the Diet, while in 1908 they won just 6 out of 43 seats.
In 1918–1920, a series of violent fights took place in the city of Split between Croats and Italians, culminating in a struggle on 11 July 1920 that resulted in the deaths of Captain Tommaso Gulli of the Italian protected cruiser Puglia, Croat civilian Matej Miš, and Italian sailor Aldo Rossi. The incidents were the cause of the destruction in Trieste of the Slovenian Cultural Centre by Italian Fascists.
Italians of Croatia are an autochthonous historical national minority recognized by the Constitution of Croatia. As such, they elect a special representative to the Croatian Parliament. There is Italian Union of Croatia and Slovenia, in Croat Talijanska Unija, in Slovene Italijanska Unija, which is Croat-Slovene organization with main site in Fiume-Rijeka and secondary site in Capodistria-Koper of Slovenia.
Italian irredentism in Dalmatia was the political movement supporting the unification to Italy, during the 19th and 20th centuries, of Adriatic Dalmatia.
The Province of Zara was a province of the Kingdom of Italy, officially from 1918 to 1947. In 1941 it was enlarged and made part of the Italian Governorate of Dalmatia, during World War II, until 1943.
The 1941 Treaties of Rome were a series of treaties concluded by the Fascist Italian regime and the World War II collaborationist Independent State of Croatia on 18 May 1941, following the Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia. The treaties determined the borders between the NDH and Italy, effectively ceding territory largely organised as the Governorate of Dalmatia to the latter. They also prohibited the NDH from deploying naval forces to the Adriatic Sea, and restricted movement of its troops in the Italian-controlled part of the NDH.
The city of Split was founded as the Greek colony of Aspálathos (Aσπάλαθος) in the 3rd or 2nd century BC. It became a prominent settlement around 650 CE when it succeeded the ancient capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia, Salona. After the Sack of Salona by the Avars and Slavs, the fortified Palace of Diocletian was settled by the Roman refugees. Split became a Byzantine city, to later gradually drift into the sphere of the Republic of Venice and the Kingdom of Croatia, with the Byzantines retaining nominal suzerainty. For much of the High and Late Middle Ages, Split enjoyed autonomy as a free city, caught in the middle of a struggle between Venice and the King of Hungary for control over the Dalmatian city-states.