Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned that he had grown up before the Second World War in the Adriatic port city of Rijeka, where his father had worked in a factory making torpedoes. “Most of the torpedoes used by the Axis during the war were made there,” he informed me.

It so happened that I knew something about Rijeka, or at least I knew something about Fiume, which is what Rijeka was called before the war when it was a possession of Italy. I had once researched the city for a book that was never written, and I learned that Fiume/Rijeka is one of those places that are not allowed a peaceful history. Over the centuries it has been controlled by Romans, Magyars, Habs