The history of the Italian-Yugoslav border at school

After a compendious look at the most recent results of the innovative and proficient historical research on the complex themes concerning the eastern border, this study draws a survey of how some of the most chosen high school-texts in the past twenty years deal with the events works of the Italian-Yugoslav historical commission and by the introduction since 2004 of the dedicated Memorial Day. In the above mentioned texts, although with rather different outlooks, the nearer we come to nowadays the greater appears the attention - however biased, save few exceptions - to the issue of the policy of forcible Italianization of Slavic populations carried on by Fascism in the territories annexed after WWI, a ruthless campaign once generally underestimated or passed over, not unlike Italian violent repression during the Second World War, depicted in a minimizing if not misleading or even euphemistic way. Much and growing with time is on the contrary the insistence on Yugoslav violence. A similar bias, though, emerges from a simple glimpse to some Slovenian textbooks. The conclusion is that politics keeps weighing on current Italian schoolbooks, despite the impressive advances of recent historiography.

Keywords: History of the Italian-Yugoslav border, Italian school-texts, Memorial Day, forcible Italianization, Italian violence, Yugoslav violence

• Il Mezzogiorno pre - e postunitario nei libri di Storia per le superiori Marco Rovinello, in SOCIETÀ E STORIA 174/2022 pp.769
  DOI: 10.3280/SS2021-174008

Luigi Cajani, La storia del confine italo-jugoslavo a scuola in "ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA" 273/2013, pp 576-607, DOI: 10.3280/IC2013-273003