Francesco Salata

Francesco Salata (17 September 1876 – 10 March 1944) was a Dalmatian Italian senator, politician, journalist, historian and writer. Salata was an irredentist, although he had a more legalistic approach than other contemporaries, as well as being more liberal. He initially came into conflict with Mussolini's fascists, though he ultimately aligned himself with the regime, and was employed by the fascist government, writing books apologizing for the fascist politics. Very fond of his native Dalmatia, Salata strenuously fought for Italy's annexation of its irredent lands, during and after World War I, participating in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Rapallo. Salata upheld the idea that Dalmatia, Istria and the Kvarner were, historically, Italian lands. His influence drastically declined in 1937, when Mussolini dismissed him from his role as intermediary between Italy and Austria in Vienna, and from his post as Italian Ambassador to Austria, recalling him to Italy. he wrote numerous history books, but nonetheless was well-to-do.

In 1911 Salata married Ilda Mizzan, from a Pisino (present-day Pazin, Croatia) family. They had a daughter together, Maria, born in 1911. Salata befriended and toured Istria with Gabriele D'Annunzio, who met his wife—years before her marriage to Salata—in her hometown of Pisino, during the same tour, where she designed a tribute paid to the poet upon his entry in the Istrian town,

As early as in his high school years, Salata risked to be expelled from all the schools of the empire because of his attempts to found a branch of the Lega Nazionale in Osor, which promoted the Italian language and culture in territories inhabited also by Germans, Croatians and Slovenians, that is Trentino and the Adriatic coast.

Prewar irredentism

Salata participated in conferences of the Italian society of archaeology in Istria (Società istriana di archeologia e storia patria). His first intervention was on his fellow townsman Francesco Patrizi. With his works L’antica diocesi di Ossero e la liturgia slava: pagine di storia patria ("The Ancient Diocese of Osor and the Slavic Liturgy: Pages of National History", 1897) and Nuovi studi sulla liturgia slava ("New Studies on Slavic Liturgy", 1897), he joined the debate against the usage of the modern Slavic languages in the Catholic churches of Istria and the Kvarner which, according to Salata and the other critics, was promoted by exploiting Old Church Slavonic liturgy. Both works end with an attack on the Slovenian and Croatian clergy. Salata acted as an intermediary between the two delegations, and his conversations with Serbian Foreign Minister Ante Trumbić determined the extent of Italy's territorial gains. Salata argued that Oberdan's mother, Gioseffa Maria Oberdank, had been “Italian for many generations" and thus "in the martyr’s veins there ran no mixed blood, but purely Italian blood, both from his mother’s and his father’s side." Mussolini would go on to send Salata money—100,000 lire, the equivalent of several tens of thousands of US dollars in 2026—during the latter's last years in Rome, knowing him was then poor, but, as recounted by Cardinal Celso Costantini, Salata refused the money out of pride. Salata was appointed to several prominent positions in the Italian academic world. He obtained the Fascist Party card ad honorem in 1929, on the occasion of his speech in Pisino (Pazin), and was signed to the National Fascist Union of the Senate (Unione nazionale fascista del Senato). In the same year, he began working at the archive of the Italian Foreign Ministry. is still considered an important exegesis and fundamental history work on the Four-Power Pact. According to Iryna Vushko, Salata had come far from "his initial wariness of Mussolini to serving, by the late 1920s, as the regime's key ideologist, a go-to man for nationalist propaganda". as well as for the founding of an institute of Austrian culture in Rome. ), to serve as unofficial intermediary between Rome and Vienna, In 1936 he also became Italian ambassador to Austria. a few months before the city was liberated by the Anglo-American troops. Though he resisted Nazism, Salata gradually supported Fascism and remained loyal to Mussolini until his death.

Personal life Salata was married to Ilda Mizzan, daughter of Giovanni—who ran a historic pharmacy in Trieste's Piazza Venezia—and cousin of Carlo, owner of Cittanova's (Novigrad) city pharmacy, all from a family of shoemakers turned pharmacists. Ilda was the sister of diplomat Ezio, making the latter and Salata brothers-in-law. Salata's own sister, Giovanna "Nina" Salata, likewise married a pharmacist, Elio Bracco, founder of Italian multinational Bracco. Jan Gawronski, Polish ambassador to Austria, who knew Salata well and was on good terms with him, claimed in his memoir Moja misja w Wiedniu 1932-1938 that Salata was of Jewish origin. However, according to Cardinal Celso Costantini—who was with Salata in his last years, plagued by illness—the former gave Salata a copy of his book Jesus Christ: The Way, Truth, and Life, which Costantini says Salata told him had "comforted him immensely".

Works L'antica diocesi di Ossero e la liturgia slava: pagine di storia patria, Martinolich, Pola 1897 Il diritto d'Italia su Trieste e l'Istria, documenti, Bocca, Turin 1915 Guglielmo Oberdan secondo gli atti segreti del processo: carteggi diplomatici e altri documenti inediti, Zanichelli, Bologna 1924 Per la storia diplomatica della Questione romana, Treves, Milan 1929 Carlo Alberto inedito: il diario autografo del re, lettere intime ed altri scritti inediti, Mondadori, Milan 1931 Maria Luigia e i moti del trentuno: documenti inediti da archivi austriaci, Fresching, Parma 1932 Oberdan, Mondadori, Milan 1932 Re Carlo Alberto e l’istituzione del Consiglio di Stato: propositi politici e riflessi diplomatici; con note e documenti inediti (essay) in Il Consiglio di Stato: studi in occasione del centenario, I, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, Rome 1932 Il patto Mussolini: storia di un piano politico e di un negoziato diplomatico, Mondadori, Milan 1933 Da Carlo Alberto a Vittorio Emanuele II (essay) in Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, Libreria dello Stato, Rome 1935 Lettere di Carlo Alberto a Federico Truchsess, Le Monnier, Florence 1937 Il nodo di Gibuti: storia diplomatica su documenti inediti, ISPI, Milan 1939