Trieste 1945, the eastern border. On a small patch of land two wars overlapped – that from the East and that from the West –two occupations – the Yugoslavian one and the Anglo-American one, competed against the other. It was the first international crisis of the post-war period, a herald of future continental rivalries. On the ground, after years of tension but also cooperation against the common foe, the Yugoslavian resistance movement swallowed up the Italian one. The clash would divide for years to come a society with long-established antagonistic national and political aspirations. Trieste 1945 was a special testing ground, not only for international politics and relations between the movements for liberation, but also owing to the complicated relations between the Italian Communist Party and the Yugoslavian Communist party, because behind the crisis on the borders the greatest end game was at stake – democracy or revolution? Trieste 1945, the historic scene of the foibe tragedy: a local variant to the detriment of Italians of a general process that involved all the territories where the Communist Yugoslav partisans took power in that May of bloodshed, and where only now events appear in sharper focus. Raoul Pupo addresses the issues and questions that regard the whole of Italy, but which for a long time were discussed almost exclusively at the margins of that ‘bellicose periphery’.