The Red Italians of Monfalcone
Everyday Fascism, Communist Horizons, and the Migration of an Italian Border Community Beyond the Iron Curtain

Luke Gramith (Author)

9780299356101

Hardback, published 30 June 2026

378 pages, 4 b&w illus. - 3 maps - 2 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.654 kg

“An original study, methodologically and historiographically, based on extensive and impressive primary research.” - John Foot, author of Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism

“Enriches a page of Cold War history on the southeastern borders of Europe. A multiethnic, working-class harbor, Monfalcone soon became an antifascist town and a communist bastion troubled by internal political conflicts and marked by Italian exodus and counterexodus. With an innovative approach to archives and oral history, Gramith writes a new chapter of the long-standing Adriatic question.” - Patrizia Dogliani, Historian, University of Bologna

Between 1946 and 1948, roughly 5,000 ethnic Italians from the northern Adriatic shipbuilding town of Monfalcone relocated to the newly communist Yugoslavia. This rare case of eastward Cold War migration demonstrates how ordinary people conceived of liberation during the transitional years between World War II and the early Cold War—a time when Monfalcone was both the object of competing Italian and Yugoslav territorial claims and the subject of Anglo-American military occupation.

In The Red Italians of Monfalcone, Luke Gramith undertakes a deep and detailed analysis—based on archival sources in Italy, Slovenia, and the United States—of how the Monfalconesi came to understand fascism and communism through everyday experience, and how those emergent ideologies affected and were affected by their migration. In the course of his analysis, Gramith also examines the failure of “defascistization” and how it fueled strong (but ultimately unsuccessful) pro-Yugoslav and communist movements.

List of Illustrations
Note on Place-Names
List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I. Fascism and Defascistization in Monfalcone: The Everyday Perspective
1. “
Everyday Fascism”
and Its Discontents
2. Envisioning “
Defascistization”
amid Civil War
3. The Arrival of the AMG and the Resurgence of Everyday Fascism

Part II. Monfalcone in Turmoil: Defascistization and Pro-Yugoslavism After 1945
4. Myth and Mobilization in Spring 1946
5. Flailing Forward: Evolutions in the Myth of Yugoslavia and Contradictions
in the Struggle Against Everyday Fascism
6. The Defeat of “
Monfalcone Antifascista”


Part III. Monfalconesi on the Move
7: “
Everyone to Yugoslavia”
or “
No One to Yugoslavia”
? The Controesodo of
1947
8. The Limits of Liberation in the New Yugoslavia
9. Controesodo, Cold War, Iron Curtain

Conclusion

Glossary of Commonly Used Italian Terms
Glossary of Organizations and Political Parties
Appendix: Monfalconese Emigration by the Numbers

Notes
Bibliography
Index