Mr. Susmel begins by saying that the origins of the Italianity of
Rieka lose themselves in the story of Rome. He knows--none
better--that the Romans came to these parts. They disappeared--but of
course one can't put in every detail. Anyhow, they left an arch, a lot
of coins, some vases, etc.; and a few of these are depicted in Mr.
Susmel's book. What a relief it must have been to innumerable people
as they turned his pages and discovered that he had forgotten to
include the illustrations of our Roman Wall, of the Pont du Gard and
of the glorious aqueduct that traverses Segovia! From the time of the
"Krpitsa" onwards a regular colonization began. Italians were urged to
come from their own country--but if Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who studied
the question on the spot, is accurate in his diagnosis that Fiume is
Italian "with that intensity of feeling bred by alien rule and the
sudden victorious liberation therefrom" (_Land and Water_, May 29,
1919), it certainly does seem a little strange that the Italians
should think in this way of the Magyars who invited them and were so
good to them. They were told, no doubt, by the Magyars that the Croats
would not hurt them, that the city council would always be Italian,
that if the saucy Croats asked for schools--as indeed their numbers
entitled them to do--well, they would receive no reply. ("Show me a
single Croat school!" cried the Italian mayor triumphantly to me in
1919.) The Magyars spent vast sums on the harbour, making the other
little harbours of Croatia obsolete, and they were not going to lose
their grip of the town for want of proper legislation. They were
surprised that more "regnicoli" (Italians from Italy) did not respond;
but the renegades made up for them. "Passionate and justified," said
Mr. Hilaire Belloc in 1919,[52] is Italian feeling with respect to
Fiume. But this writer, who says he travelled to the Adriatic with a
view to ascertaining the real facts, did not altogether waste his
time, since one of his two adjectives is quite correct. With regard to
the renegades no questions were ever asked, if only one helped to keep
Rieka from the Croats, if, for example, on a voting paper for the
Croatian Diet one put the word "nessuno" (no one). Mr. Susmel, I see,
says that the Diet's continued invitation to the town that it should
send its deputies to Zagreb was a display of "incredible obstinacy."