Giani Stuparich

An anguished memory of the Hotel Balkan events (see yesterday's post) is narrated by Giani Stuparich (Trieste, 1981 - Rome, 1961) in "Trieste nei miei ricordi".
"I'll never forget that summer afternoon in 1920 when the Balkan was set on fire. [...] In the tragic spectacle of that afternoon I sensed something appalling: the boundaries of that square opened the way to a deadly vision of decay and ruin, as if something much more ghastly than war itself was threatening the foundations of our civilization [...]. The fascists were responding to the cruel events of Split, where officers of the Italian ship Puglia had been beaten up and Gulli, the commanding officer, had been fatally wounded. I had believed that a civilized country had higher aims than that of being violent with even more arbitrary violence, blindly hitting out at innocent people in order to punish the offenders and making a whole nation responsible for the insane acts of only a few of its members. If the Balkan was actually a den of conspirators and Slavic murderers, as was alleged afterwards to justify "the people's anger", if it really was a threat to the quiet city life, couldn't a governor with all the legal powers and local police at his disposal, have expurgated it and made it harmless?
But the truth was that violence, as a brutal method, was in the soul and in the intentions of a group of men that tended to leave the confused mass in order to seize the State power".