Books By the Bay: Fiume Crisis
Recording: Books By the Bay: Fiume Crisis
Hello, this is Alexy Khrabrov. And um this is a series where I talk about various books. I have maybe 5,000 books in the US and maybe another 5,000 books abroad. So, I always read books. I get books almost, you know, every week. And I read multiple books at the same time. I like books on history, biography, political science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, poetry, and limits. So, this is a interesting book called The Fiume Crisis
Uh a life in the week of the Habsburg Empire. And it's about the city of Fiume, which is now called Rijeka, and is in Croatia, but it used to be in the Austrian-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. And after the First World War, there was this famous period when uh it was uncertain. It was basically a city-state, and the Versailles Treaty was concerned of this. And while, you know, uh the fate of this city was decided, Italy didn't want to annex it because of the Versailles negotiations. And Yugoslavia being formed out of various remnants of the uh Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Uh meanwhile, 50% roughly of the city were Italians, and uh the um uh main uh population in Italy, the nationalists wanted to annex it. So, Gabriele D'Annunzio, the famous Italian uh poet and provocateur, uh effectively took over and established the Republic uh of Fiume, which uh in the end became Regency of Carnaro, and he created a constitution where music and art were some of the core principles
And it was a famous place where the anarchists and bohemians from around the world gathered. So this book actually tries to put this into perspective. This romantic story was superimposed over multicultural population of Fiume. So the author Domenico Rial who is a professor professor at the University of Miami Professor of Modern European History she makes a very interesting case that in fact uh it was as Serbian Croatian Slovene as it was Italian and it was integrated it was actually very independent. It used the fact that it had its own laws its own government layered onto this Austro-Hungarian Empire. They continued to do this with Italy and others and there are multiple stories here about the currency about the divorce. For instance divorce was legal in Fiume under any reason. There was a whole set of reasons neglect and you know meanness and adultery and so forth and in Italy which is was a Catholic country divorce was illegal
And a lot of Italians it turns out went to Fiume to get divorced including Marconi the famous inventor of radio went to Fiume to get divorced. So that's you know one of the interesting topics. I really like this idea. I actually have a proposal for the government of Croatia since D'Annunzio was around 55-56 when he went there right and became a hero became the you know comandante of this new republic and had a lot of kind of folks accompany him and he was doing poetry readings make Rijeka the middle age crisis capital of the world make it a theme park where you know uh, immersed in arts and philosophy, and, you know, be like D'Annunzio, all right? Do something radical in your middle age. Lead people. Lead with art. Create a community. It can be very fun, you know, historic theme park to do
And, uh, I want to thank some of my friends who uh, kind of gave me feedback on this idea from Croatia and Slovenia. And there is a uh, movie now called Fiume o morte. Uh, shot in Croatia recently. It is a beautiful, beautiful kind of snapshot. Highly recommended with historical documents. So this is the story for today. The