Italocentric Narratives of Exile: History, Identity and Literature of Zadar’s Italians

Abstract

This article examines italocentric narratives of exile in the literature of Zadar’s Italians, a community displaced in the mid-twentieth century, and reads exile not only as a historical event but as a fundamental matrix of identity, memory and narrative. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Claudio Guillén, as well as on the historiographical work of Luciano Monzali, the study argues that exile among Zadar’s Italians functions as a profound cultural and emotional structure in which the lost city of Zadar becomes a mythical topos and the central symbol of collective self-understanding. Italocentrism is interpreted not as a rigid ideological stance, but as a compensatory identity mechanism that reconstructs a sense of continuity by inscribing the city and its history into an Italian cultural frame. In the analytical core, the article focuses on three key authors: Raffaele Cecconi, Liana De Luca and Caterina Felici. Through close readings of Cecconi’s fragmentary and meditative prose, De Luca’s introspective and sensorial lyricism, and Felici’s minimalist and intimate writing, the article shows how exile is transformed into a variety of poetics that share several structural traits: the idealisation of Zadar as a lost urban centre, the use of fragment as a dominant narrative form, the centrality of memory and everyday detail, and a persistent tension between nostalgia and melancholy. Exile emerges as both historical wound and creative resource, shaping language, imagery and the temporal structure of the texts. The discussion situates these Italocentric narratives within the broader field of European exile literature, while insisting on their specific Adriatic and urban dimension: for Zadar’s Italians, exile is not primarily the loss of a state but the loss of a city. By reconstructing the symbolic geography of Zadar in language, these authors create an inner space of belonging that compensates for the irreversibility of historical rupture. The article concludes that the literature of Zadar’s Italians in exile constitutes an important contribution not only to Italian and Croatian-Italian literary history, but also to the global tradition of exile writing, offering a nuanced perspective on how modern subjects negotiate identity, belonging and meaning under the conditions of dispossession.