Exploring Italy’s Gorizia and Slovenia’s Nova Gorica, the first cross-border Capitals of Culture

When the walls came tumbling down

As Italy’s Gorizia and Slovenia’s Nova Gorica become the first cross-border Capitals of Culture, we visit an area still coming to terms with its divided past

Words Debbie Ward

The Go! Borderless festivities see events and exhibitions pondering the legacy of a divide that scarred these regions for generations (Debbie Ward)

Roaming around us as we chatted, Mauro Leban’s golden retriever unknowingly recreated a famous picture. Back in 1947, a cow belonging to the retired farmer’s family was photographed in their yard. It stood astride a freshly painted white line, its front legs in Yugoslavia (now Slovenia), its back legs in Italy.
The image came to represent the absurdity of a border drawn up in Paris by the Allies in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the newly Italian city of Gorizia, 45km north of Trieste, the line divided property and relatives overnight. As the Cold War went on, it was reinforced with barbed-wire fences patrolled by guards. Mauro had to show a special passport just to access half of his fields.

Since Slovenia joined Italy in the EU in 2004, and then the Schengen area in 2007, the border has been essentially invisible. This year, at the latter’s invitation, Gorizia and its modern Slovenian counterpart Nova Gorica become the first joint-nation European Capitals of Culture. It’s a momentous occasion given the 20th-century history of the two cities, though one that few outside this region would recognise. I wanted to learn more about two neighbours still trying to make sense of the situation that divided them.

The opening Capitals of Culture ceremony is going to be held on the Piazza della Transalpina/Trg Evrope, a square shared by both Gorizia and Nova Gorica that was once divided by a barbed-wire fence (Maja Murenc)

Across the divide

The Berlin-style division is just one aspect of the area’s complex heritage. Gorizia began the 20th century as a multicultural corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which four languages – Friulian, Venetian, German and Slovene – were in daily use. During the First World War, the city was taken by Italy; in the Second World War, it fell into German hands; then, after the war, Yugoslavia took over. At each turn, parts of its population endured suppression. By the time the infamous line handed most of Gorizia to Italy in 1947, it had been ruled by Mussolini, Hitler and Tito.

Piazza della Vittoria, the de facto centre of Gorizia, betrays layers of this complicated past. The square is edged with Austro-Hungarian-era pastel buildings and a Baroque-style church with onion-domed bell towers. Café terraces cluster around the shrapnel-pocked Neptune fountain and everything is overlooked by a rebuilt hilltop castle containing a museum on the First World War.

I wandered over to Gorizia’s cathedral, another reconstruction. Thankfully, its old chapel remains intact, retaining its 15th-century frescoes. Elsewhere, another survivor of the city’s torrid history is the 18th-century synagogue, now home to a museum. The town’s Jewish community weren’t so fortunate: two Jewish teenagers were Gorizia’s sole survivors of Germany’s Second World War death camps. The names of some of the disappeared appear on tiny brass tiles within the paving slabs of an adjacent pocket-sized park.

I stayed on Via Rastello, a street beloved of period-drama film crews. This area has been revitalised with pop-ups; it also has stories to tell. Amid the old shopfronts, a plaque marks the home of a former resident who journeyed from his own divided city to West Berlin in the 1960s to help dig Tunnel 29, an escape route beneath the Berlin Wall that is named after the number of refugees who fled through it.

I spent the morning high above Gorizia in the hills surrounding the Italian village of Oslavia. Its patchwork of vineyards is part of the Collio wine region, and I watched as ribbons of autumnal mist drifted over the vines. Together with my guide Raffaella Grasselli, I was here to hike a new walking route known as the Orange Bench Trail, which links seven wine cellars. As we strolled, I saw leafless trees bright with overripe persimmons. What few roads I encountered were busier with Lycra-clad cyclists than cars.

I tried to imagine this peaceful landscape carved with trenches, as it was during the First World War. This area was even referenced in Ernest Hemingway’s wartime epic novel A Farewell to Arms, and it saw some of the most severe fighting in Italy.

I was curious about the legacies of that era, so I called in on Matej Feigl, a second-generation winemaker. His Fiegl Winery is among the collective of seven vineyards that created the trail, and visitors can drop in at their cellar doors for tastings in between hunting out notable viewpoints, where QR codes reveal more of the region’s history. I asked Matej if he still found relics of the war on his land.

“You’ll see in the cellar,” he told me, giving a wry smile. He didn’t disappoint.

Helmets, badges, flasks and grenades scattered display cases, with a row of large shells arranged alongside them on the floor. Such discoveries are common here, and Matej teased that he didn’t always bother to get the ammunition defused.

His attitude speaks to a wider tale of resilience that is told across this region. On these embattled slopes, legend has it that one of the few agricultural survivors of the war was the ribolla gialla grape variety. Its juice and macerated skins are now used to produce Oslavia’s orange wines, named for their distinctive amber hue.

Just beyond Matej’s vines lay the towering stone cylinder of the Oslavia War Memorial. It’s one of the largest First World War cemeteries in Italy, an ossuary containing the remains of thousands of soldiers, though only a fraction of them are named on the inscribed inner walls.

Mussolini opened the memorial in 1938. On the same visit, he made a speech at Trieste outlining new anti-Jewish laws, including a ban on mixed marriages, exclusion from a range of professions and loss of nationality.

“He closed the chapter on the First World War with this cemetery and opened the path to the Second World War with his speech,” my Gorizia guide Raffaella later commented.

The view from Gorizia Castle over the terracotta roofs of the old town (Shutterstock)

How the other half lived

Across the border, in the hills of Slovenia, I was later surprised to find a tribute to another dictator: former Yugoslavia president Josip Broz Tito. Since the collapse of Communism, only the affectionate word Naš (meaning ‘our’) had been removed from the giant stone inscription that originally read, ‘Naš Tito’.

“There’s no nostalgia,” my Slovenian guide Boris Strukelj explained. “But you need to look at Tito as two separate figures: the dictator… but also the person who freed this area from Nazi fascism.”

“Tito approved plans to create Nova Gorica, creating a kind of display windows to the West”

The creation of the border in 1947 had left Communist Yugoslavia with few of the divided city’s facilities. In response, Tito approved plans to create Nova Gorica (New Gorizia), creating a kind of display window to the West. Early aspects of the city were designed by Edvard Ravnikar, a former student of influential Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. The first residents – lured from farmland to a then shopless city – were given apartments with south-facing balconies big enough to keep two pigs and ten hens.

A mission statement inscribed on a wall near the city centre still reads: ‘We will build something beautiful that will shine across the border.’ Having previously browsed Gorizia’s cobbled streets, shuttered windows and old mansions, ‘beauty’ was not the first word that came to mind as I strolled its neighbour. But, as Slovenian writer and guide Blaž Kosovel explained: “Nova Gorica is a really good example for teaching urbanism. It’s the now-fashionable 15-minute city.”

We strolled between zones separating the residential, social and political. Instead of churches at the centre, there were arts hubs. Blaž pointed out how its Modernist apartment blocks ranged from village-style to high-rise and were spaced so as not to shade each other. Nova Gorica even claims to have had a supermarket before Italy or Austria, and in the 1980s, it purposefully lured its neighbours across the border to gamble in the town’s first casino.

Memories of the past are everywhere in the city. Posturing Socialist statues of soldiers and farmers front the City Hall, facing a lawn that will host some of this year’s Capitals of Culture events. More subtle sculptures from 2008 commemorate the free labour of the Youth Work Brigades, who arrived from across Yugoslavia to lay the show town’s foundations.

There were some incongruous elements too, such as the pines and palm trees that edge Nova Gorica’s main boulevard. Even more bizarre was the sight of three ancient headstones – a reminder that this part of the city was once a cemetery in Gorizia.

I encountered more exotic planting at Park Rafut, a formerly private botanical garden that opened to the public last year following a long restoration. Here I weaved among sequoia, cork trees and towering bamboo stalks only to discover an Egyptian-influenced villa. It’s perhaps not so unexpected given the park was completed in the early 20th century by Anton Laščak, who had worked as an architect in Alexandria.

More unusual history lay in the hilltop Kostanjevica Franciscan monastery, where I laid my hand on the cool marble tomb of the exiled French king Charles X. He was the last reigning monarch of the Bourbon dynasty, which had returned to the French throne following the death of Napoleon. Such was his unpopularity, however, he lasted just five years before a revolution sent him back into exile. He died nearby, in 1836, after unsuccessfully fleeing a cholera outbreak. Amid grapevines and olives, a garden of highly scented Bourbon roses is tended here in his family’s memory. His homeland had no such sentimentality at the time and reputedly rejected the gift of his heart.

Perhaps Nova Gorica’s greatest draw to visitors is as a gateway to the Soča/Isonzo River, famous for its kayaking, rafting and canyoning. On the city’s outskirts, the startling turquoise water is spanned by the Solkan Bridge, the world’s longest stone arch viaduct, on which a piano recital will be held this summer as part of the Capitals of Culture celebrations. It was inaugurated in 1906 by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose later assassination sparked the First World War. It was yet another reminder of how this area sits at a crossroads in European history.

Oslavia’s war memorial rises above the vine-growing hills of the Collio region, which was once part of the Isonzo Front – a brutal First World War battleground on which some 1.7 million soldiers were either killed or severely injured (Shutterstock)

New connections

Back on the Italian side of the border, I found myself shaping plum-stuffed gnocchi in my palms at a community kitchen in Gorizia. It was here that I learnt how history infuses even the local cuisine. Restaurant menus in town are filled with hearty Hungarian-influenced goulash as well as pasta dishes and gooey cheese-and-potato frico (a potato pancake speciality of the Fruili-Venezia Guili region). My gnocchi was inspired by the upcoming celebrations and contained fruity twists from the region’s Austro-Hungarian roots.

By now, I’d become accustomed to my phone pinging several times a day to welcome me to Italy or Slovenia. By taxi or on foot, I hopped freely between the two to learn both sides of their story. Inside a former Italian guards’ hut at the border by Mauro’s farmyard, I watched archive footage of the 1947 line being poured from paint pots and heard modern residents’ testimonies. One told how, fearful of being branded a collaborator, her relative would only greet her cross-border family by shaking dust from a dropped hanky.

Later, I strode a few metres to the Slovenian checkpoint, which now houses the tiny Museum of Smuggling. From the mid-1950s, limited day trips were allowed across the border, bringing new black-market opportunities: cheap meat and eggs from Yugoslavia; coffee, fashion and electronics from Italy. Contraband was stowed in bike tyres, car light housings and bras.

“Contraband was stowed in bike tyres, car light housings and bras”

“Slowly, smuggling turned into a national sport,” smiled curator Davor Mihelic.

I chuckled at the displays of shoes with hollow heels, tape recorders in washing powder and the reconstructed interrogation area that doubled as a modern-day escape room. More sobering was a chart of relative values: 30kg of Italian coffee could buy a wedding reception at a Yugoslavian restaurant.

If petty smuggling (which rarely risked more than fines) inspired ever-greater feats of ingenuity, a less subtle version was played out in Miren Cemetery. Here, packages were routinely lobbed over the fence, only to be batted back when spotted by guards. I stood astride a line of tiles marking the old border, a foot in each country, and I noticed the divide had even sliced through someone’s grave.

The tales of smuggling had given me a sense of cross-border solidarity. Yet when I joined Gioele Peressini of digital arts organisation Association 4704 for a coffee in Gorizia, he shared his concerns that these transactional relationships still linger today.

“We use each other,” he shrugged. “There’s this idea of unbalanced power. The Cold War is still in the behaviour,” he told me. “The European Capitals of Culture is a nice opportunity but it’s not the solution for 70 years of bad political choices.”

Gioele told me about growing up with jets from a NATO base flying over his garden to Kosovo, and how it hurt to see the wire fence fleetingly rise again during the pandemic to enforce Italy and Slovenia’s differing restrictions. But he was also enthused by art’s power to enlighten. Association 4704 produced the films I’d seen earlier at the former checkpoint, and it mounts the cross-border In/Visible Cities festival each September, highlighting local history. Its Capitals of Culture initiatives will include site-specific audio performances.

Gioele stressed: “What we want to show people is that the history of the culture of Gorizia is not just an Italian culture… there’s also a part of this culture we rejected.”

The opening ceremony for European Capitals of Culture 2025 took place in the square known as Piazza della Transalpina to Italians and Trg Evrope to Slovenians. It’s here the latter’s EU ascension was celebrated with the symbolic removal of the border fence in 2004. A much-photographed metal disc at its centre marks the path of the invisible division.

The original railway station on the square’s Slovenian side has trains to lakes Bled and Bohinj. Several blocks away, Italy’s Gorizia Central Station serves Trieste, Venice and Naples. The two hubs have never been connected before, but thanks to Capitals of Culture talks, they will finally link up via the suburb of Šempeter pri Gorici. It’s a 20-minute journey that has taken 78 years to happen.

The largest stone viaduct in the world towers over the Soča Valley (Marijan Močivnik)

Need to know

When to go

Year-round, but the twin cities’ year in the sun begins on 8 February with the Capitals of Culture opening ceremony. Thereafter, events scatter the calendar.

Getting there and around

Gorizia and Nova Gorica’s centres are a 45-minute walk apart. They can be accessed by road or train from Venice, Trieste or Ljubljana, all within two hours. Airlines serving these gateways include British Airways, easyJet, Ryanair and Wizz Air. A direct flight from London Gatwick to Ljubljana, for example, takes from two hours and 15 minutes and costs from £46 return.

Carbon offset

A return flight from London to Ljubljana produces 248kg of CO2 per passenger. Wanderlust encourages you to offset your travel footprint through a reputable provider. For advice on finding one, visit wanderlustmagazine.com/inspiration/sustainable-travel.

Where to stay

In Gorizia, the Grand Hotel Entourage offers rooms in a modernised 16th-century palace. Or try 1848 Chef’s Rooms, a stone-walled heritage conversion with a communal kitchen on Via Rastello. Both are centrally located.

Nova Gorica’s casino hotel Perla Resort & Entertainment has a smart basement spa and pool, and its Calypso restaurant is highly recommended. Alternatively, DAM hotel is a boutique stay with its own Michelin-starred eatery, while the villa-style Sabotin in nearby Solkan is a good base for cycling and river adventures.