This article explores the Italian government’s attitude towards Trieste and its territory in public discourse and the unique role of the disputed area as a means of reinforcing, challenging or disrupting nationalist rhetoric of Italian nationhood after 1945. It argues that the central government’s projected image of the disputed border vacillated between that of a wall and a bridge at the southern tip of the Iron Curtain and was utilised to either strengthen or weaken past nationalist conceptualisations of Italian identity or ‘italianità’ within and outside the Adriatic city. While producing significant resistance within the Triestine community and its émigrés, this political process also succeeded in transforming this disputed territory from a stronghold of Western democracy into a bridge toward the socialist world within public discourse. This close reading of both political and public views of Italy’s eastern border ultimately reveals the inherent fluidity and constructed meaning of ideas of nationhood in Cold War Italy.
