Autonomist Party

The Autonomist Party has been accused of secretly having been a pro-Italian movement due to their defense of the rights of ethnic Italians in Dalmatia.

[1] The Autonomist Party did not claim to be an Italian movement, and indicated that it sympathized with a sense of heterogeneity amongst Dalmatians in opposition to ethnic nationalism.

As in Zara the party remained in power up to 1914, and both cities, although claimed by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the Paris Peace Conference, were finally assigned to Italy: Zara by the Treaty of Rapallo and Fiume with the Treaty of Rome, which gave Fiume to Italy and the adjacent port of Sušak to Yugoslavia.

[4]Count Francesco Borelli Dalmatian deputy, argued for the autonomy of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, claiming that it had no connection whatsoever with Croatia.

[5] At the beginning of the 20th century the Autonomist Party, having lost his majority in nearly all Dalmatia, started to be dominated by a group of Dalmatian Italians from Zara, led by Luigi Ziliotto and Giovanni Bugatto, who supported Italian irredentism in Dalmatia: the party was suppressed in 1915 when Italy declared war on Austria during World War I.