The tour group meets on the Piazza della Transalpina, in front of a recently revamped Habsburg-era train station. The square is sparkling in the sunlight. Robert Peric, our Slovenian guide, wears an aviator jacket and has the weather-beaten look of Indiana Jones on a day off.
“I’m a former smuggler,” he tells us, “And will show you how to be one too.”
We’re standing in Gorizia, a small town near Trieste in northeastern Italy — but seconds later, we walk across the road and have unknowingly crossed the invisible border that separates Slovenia from Italy, into Nova Gorica. Both towns are this year’s European Capital of Culture — the first time that there’s been a transnational winner.
Nova Gorica (“New Gorizia” in Slovenian) didn’t exist as a town in its own right until 1947. In the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War, the Allied Powers sent a committee to explore this fertile, green area between the Karst plateau, the Alps and the Adriatic, and decide where to mark the border between what was then Yugoslavia and Italy.
“The border ended up being drawn on a map with a ruler and a pencil,” Alessandro Cattunar, a local historian, tells me later in the station café. “It split farmers’ houses from their fields, children from their schools and even cut a cemetery in two.” People weren’t able to visit the graves of relatives and farmers found that they now needed a border pass to go and feed their livestock. Overnight, families had to choose which country and which political system they wanted to belong to — an enormous decision that would affect them for decades to come.
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The new border landed on the outskirts of Gorizia. The Allies had essentially consigned all of the town’s farmland and suburbs to Yugoslavia, and the urban centre to Italy. That caused an imbalance in what products were easily available — alongside access to very different global markets — and a vast practice of smuggling began. Almost everyone did it: young or old, Italian or Yugoslav, rich or poor.
Nowadays the two towns treat their history of smuggling with a certain levity. Visitors can go on a smuggling tour, visit two compact museums about smuggling and life during the Cold War called Prepustnica (on the Slovenian side) and Lasciapassare (on the Italian side), and even take part in a smuggling-themed escape game.
It seems like everyone in Gorizia has a story to share about smuggling. One particularly prized good for Yugoslavs was coffee — so much so that you could exchange 200 grams of coffee for a dozen eggs, or 60 kilograms for a used car. Peric describes how when he was a child, if his mother bought three kilograms of coffee in Italy, she would put it on the car’s back seat and tell the kids to sit on it, then cover them in blankets. They then had to pretend to sleep until they got past customs. Evelin Bizjak, my Slovenian guide for the day, recounts how once her father’s car broke down and the mechanic said it would take a few days to fix it. But when a bag of coffee exchanged hands, suddenly the parts were available and the car was fixed that day.
On the tour we get to try out smuggling ourselves. I’ve been given a porn magazine to take back to censorious Yugoslavia: an old edition of Playboy with Joan Collins in a red dress on the cover. We have to confront a man dressed up as a border guard, who stands stiffly in the road, barking orders. I’m suddenly feeling nervous with the fake Playboy stuffed into my handbag, whereas an American child on the tour gleefully tucks a huge roll of cash into his sleeve and lines up happily.
The “customs officer” accuses the person in front of me of having too baggy jeans: “Suspicious. Roll up your trouser leg!”
This peculiar instruction harks back to Yugoslavs’ obsession with Levi’s jeans. Peric tells us that one trick involved choosing the skinniest person to go over the border and buy three pairs of jeans: one very tight, one normal size and one oversized. Then they would wear all of them at once and waddle back into Yugoslavia.
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Luckily my wide-eyed innocence convinces the guard and my scandalous Playboy is let through. The two-hour tour is great for families, with the kids around me earnestly playing their parts (adults £29, children £13; sverctura.si). But Cattunar tells me that the absurd nature of smuggling hides darker facets of that era, like the violence of Italy’s fascist regime and the foibe massacres (mass killings of opponents to the Communist regime by Yugoslav forces, named after the naturally occurring sinkholes in the Karst area into which victims were thrown alive). Against that background, smuggling was actually an activity that united the two communities.
Cattunar says that the Capital of Culture honour has had the effect of reopening dialogue and cultural exchange between Gorizia and Nova Gorica. “Now we’ve remembered that it’s a good thing to be a mixed community, to be people who live between cultures and languages. We don’t need to just talk about the dark side of nationalism. We can also be a model for cross-border relations,” says Cattunar.
The sudden separation of the two communities in 1947 had the effect of cementing political and cultural differences. Before the war, there was more linguistic mixing — Slovenians often spoke Italian and vice versa, and during Austro-Hungarian rule schooling was in German, which provided a common language. Nova Gorica was built from scratch, and that’s immediately apparent in the architecture. Gorizia’s ochre and terracotta houses, cobbled streets and large Austrian squares are far quainter than Nova Gorica’s grey, straight avenues and Soviet rectangular buildings. Bizjak explains that locals cross freely between the two towns, sometimes just to pop to the shops for a product that might be cheaper over the border.
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It’s weird, then, that in mid-2024, as the two towns announced their “GO! Borderless” slogan for the Capital of Culture designation, the Italian government imposed random border checks between Gorizia and Slovenia as an “antiterrorism measure”, to crack down on migrants coming into Europe through the Balkans. Our tour passes a small group of police officers waving down the occasional car coming through the border for security checks, next to the “Italia” road sign in EU-blue.
War is part of the landscape here: Second World War bomb fragments are still frequently found in the fields surrounding the towns, while the Sabatino hill that looms over the Nova Gorica station has a Cold War-era Hollywood sign: huge letters painted in white, spelling out TITO. Rudyard Kipling came to the area in 1917 to report from the front lines, writing evocatively: “Gorizia, pink, white, and bluish, lay, to all appearance, asleep beneath us […] by the talking Isonzo.” In the dry March sun, Gorizia is again pink with the flowering cherry blossom that lines the streets of the town, and the Isonzo river is a mad rush of white — still talking — through the fields.
If you’re on the Kipling trail, you can stay at La Casa di Kipling, a beautifully decorated apartment run by a local family, just a short walk from Gorizia’s centre. A picture of its namesake hangs in the hallway and it comes with everything you could possibly need — including an ingenious cupboard with the essentials: make-up remover, a hairbrush, toothpaste and more. The owner Marilisa Bombi is a font of local knowledge and will happily help you book local experiences or museums. One of the things worth doing is a wine tasting in Italy’s nearby Collio region, known for its unique climate and rocky, saline soil.
Vineyards draped over the hills produce the acidic and floral Ribolla Gialla grape and are famous for orange wines. I visit the Radikon family winery, where the owner Sasa introduces me to a selection of their aromatic vintages in flawless English. There are also rooms if you fancy waking up to Kipling’s pink light over the vineyards (B&B doubles for two from £100, tastings from £17pp; radikon.it).
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Although there’s enough in Gorizia to occupy you for a long weekend, you can also take a day trip to Grado — a mini-Venice on a lagoon, and the preferred spa town of the Austrian empire — or for a bit more action, hike in Slovenia’s Vipava Valley or go kayaking in nearby Solkan. Don’t miss the Kostanjevica Monastery, with its more than 10,000 ancient books and a beautiful rose arbour that looks out across the town and where, in an unlikely twist of history, the last of France’s Bourbon kings are buried (samostan-kostanjevica.si).
Known for being the place where the last wall dividing east and west came down, Gorizia and Nova Gorica are a fascinating symbol of European unity, but also illustrate its fragility — it only takes the whims of a belligerent government to risk the return of borders once again.
Catherine Bennett was a guest of La Casa di Kipling, which has room-only doubles from £134 (lussosulconfine.it), the Friuli-Venezia Giulia tourist board (turismofvg.it/en) and the Vipavska Dolina tourist board (vipavskadolina.si/). Fly to Trieste
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