Treaty of Rapallo, 1920

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Map of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1919 showing the provisional borders in the aftermath of World War I before the treaties of Neuilly, Trianon and Rapallo
Map of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1919 showing the provisional borders in the aftermath of World War I before the treaties of Neuilly, Trianon and Rapallo

The Treaty of Rapallo was a treaty between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929), signed to solve the dispute over some territories in the upper Adriatic, known as the Julian March.

The treaty was signed on 12 November 1920[citation needed] in Rapallo near Genoa in Italy. Tension between Italy and Yugoslavia arose at the end of World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved and Italy occupied the territories assigned to it by the London Pact of 1915. These territories had however an ethnically mixed population, with Slovenes and Croats composing over the half of the population of the region.

According to the treaty, the following territories were annexed to Italy:

According to the treaty, the city of Rijeka (known as Fiume in Italian) would become the independent Free State of Fiume,[citation needed] thus ending the military occupation of Gabriele d'Annunzio's troops, known as the Italian Regency of Carnaro. This part of the treaty was revoked in 1924, when Italy and Yugoslavia signed the Treaty of Rome, which gave Fiume to Italy and the adjacent port of Sušak to Yugoslavia.

The treaty left a large number of Slovenes and Croats in Italy (according to the Austrian census of 1910, their number was around 500,000), as well as a small Italian minority of Dalmatia (around 15,000 people) in Yugoslavia. According to the Austrian census, around 25,000 ethnic Germans and 3,000 Hungarians also lived in the regions annexed to Italy with the Treaty.

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