Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Italian-speaking communities in Istria responded to postwar marginalization with silence. This presentation explores how saltmaking heritage in the town of Piran transforms that silence into curated nostalgia, as family secrets partially surface through idealized memories of the saltworks.

Paper long abstract

The silence of Italian-speaking inhabitants of Istrian towns has been interpreted as a coping mechanism of a community marginalized by the Yugoslav state and the Slavic-speaking majority after World War II (Hrobat Virloget 2023). By 1956, many Italian speakers had left their homes for Italy, while a minority remained and were compelled to forge new lives. The bitter postwar decades have largely gone unaddressed and are little known to later generations of Istrians. I argue, however, that their sense of historical injustice did not remain entirely submerged.

Over the past two decades, saltmaking heritage has emerged as a prominent mode of cultural expression within the community. Piran’s Italian community established the association La Famea (“the family”) to promote a nostalgic representation of salt production in the nearby salt fields. My ethnography-based research shows that narratives of life in the former saltworks are deliberately constructed and strikingly affirmative, replete with aestheticized imagery that casts the saltworks as a “fantasy,” a “dream,” or a place “full of life.” These recollections transform the past into an idealized “lost paradise” marked by social cohesion and solidarity. Widely curated and circulated through publications and commemorative events, this heritage demonstrates that the memory of saltmaking is actively produced and shared. Salt production constitutes a selectively foregrounded past through which community members engage an otherwise reticent history and articulate a shared sense of belonging. My aim is to closely examine family secrets and silences that partially surface in relation to salt production, yet remain entirely unspoken.