[7] Historically, because of its strategic position and its excellent deep-water port, the city was fiercely contested, especially between the Holy Roman Empire, Italy and Croatia, changing rulers and demographics many times over centuries.

Rijeka is located in western Croatia, 131 kilometres (81 miles) south-west of the capital, Zagreb, on the coast of Kvarner Gulf, in the northern part of the Adriatic Sea.

[12] Rijeka (Tarsatica) is again mentioned around AD 150 by the Greek geographer and astronomer Ptolemy in his Geography when describing the "Location of Illyria or Liburnia, and of Dalmatia" (Fifth Map of Europe).

[14] Austrian presence on the Adriatic Sea was seen as a threat by the Republic of Venice and during the War of the League of Cambrai the Venetians raided and devastated the city with great loss of life in 1508 and again in 1509.

In 1813 the French rule came to an end when Rijeka was first bombarded by the Royal Navy and later re-captured by the Austrians under the command of the Irish general Laval Nugent von Westmeath.

Many authors and witnesses describe Rijeka of this time as a rich, tolerant, well-to-do town which offered a good standard of living, with endless possibilities for making one's fortune.

[24] Rijeka's port underwent tremendous development fuelled by generous Hungarian investments, becoming the main maritime outlet for Hungary and the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Several hundred Italians, considered disloyal (enemy non-combatants) by the authorities, were deported to camps in Hungary (Tápiósüly and Kiskunhalas), where many died of malnutrition and diseases.

After a brief military occupation by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, followed by the unilateral annexation of the former Corpus Separatum by Belgrade, an international force of British, Italian, French and American troops entered the city in November 1918.

[35] Because the Italian government, wishing to respect its international obligations, did not want to annex Fiume, D'Annunzio and the intellectuals at his side eventually established an independent state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro, a unique social experiment for the age and a revolutionary cultural experience in which various international intellectuals of diverse walks of life took part (like Osbert Sitwell, Arturo Toscanini, Henry Furst, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Harukichi Shimoi, Guglielmo Marconi, Alceste De Ambris, Whitney Warren and Léon Kochnitzky).

[40] D'Annunzio's response was characteristically flamboyant and of doubtful judgment: his declaration of war against Italy invited the bombardment by Italian royal forces which led to his surrender of the city at the end of the year, after five days' resistance (known as Bloody Christmas).

In a subsequent democratic election the Fiuman electorate on 24 April 1921 approved the idea of a free state of Fiume-Rijeka with a Fiuman-Italo-Yugoslav consortium ownership structure for the port, giving an overwhelming victory to the independentist candidates of the Autonomist Party.

Fiume became consequently a full-fledged member of the League of Nations and the ensuing election of Rijeka's first president, Riccardo Zanella, was met with official recognition and greetings from all major powers and countries worldwide.

[41] The annexation happened de facto on 16 March 1924, and it inaugurated about twenty years of Italian government for the city proper, to the detriment of the Croatian minority, which fell victim of discrimination and targeted assimilation policies.

Once the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Croatian areas surrounding the city were occupied by the Italian military, setting the stage for an intense and bloody insurgency which would last until the end of the war.

Partisan activity included guerrilla-style attacks on isolated positions or supply columns, sabotage and killings of civilians believed to be connected to the Italian and (later) German authorities.

[46][47] Because of its industries (oil refinery, torpedo factory, shipyards) and its port facilities, the city was also a target of more than 30 Anglo-American air attacks,[48] which caused widespread destruction and hundreds of civilian deaths.

Under the command of the German general Ludwig Kübler they inflicted thousands of casualties on the attacking Partisans, which were forced by their superiors to charge uphill against well-fortified positions to the north and east of the city.

The Yugoslav commanders did not spare casualties to speed up the capture of the city, fearing a possible English landing in area which would prevent their advance towards Trieste before the war was over.

Despite insistent requests from the Fiuman government in exile collaboration with the partisans and calls to respect the city-state's internationally recognized sovereignty, and despite generous initial promises given by the Yugoslav authorities of full independence and later of extensive autonomy for the city-state (the locals were promised various degrees of autonomy at different moments during the war, most notably the possibility to be a state of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), the city was annexed by Yugoslavia and incorporated as part of the federal state of Croatia.

The situation created by the Yugoslav forces on the ground was eventually formalized by the 1947 Paris peace treaty between Italy and the Allies on 10 February 1947, despite both the complaints by the last democratically elected government and its president-in-exile Riccardo Zanella and the attempts of the experienced Italian foreign minister Carlo Sforza to uphold the previous Wilsonian plans for a multicultural Free State solution, with a local headquarters for the newly created United Nations.

The discrimination and persecution that many inhabitants experienced at the hands of Yugoslav officials, in the last days of World War II and the first years of peace, still remain painful memories for the locals and the esuli, and are somewhat of a taboo topic for Rijeka's political milieu, which is still largely denying the events.

[54] Summary executions of alleged Fascists (often well-known anti-fascists or openly apolitical), aimed at hitting the local intellectual class, the Autonomists, the commercial classes, the former Italian public servants, the military officials and often also ordinary civilians (at least 650 executions of Italians took place after the end of the war[55]) eventually forced most Italophones (of various ethnicities) to leave Rijeka/Fiume in order to avoid becoming victims of a harsher retaliation.

The removal was a meticulously planned operation, aimed at convincing the hardly assimilable Italian part of the autochthonous population to leave the country, as testified decades later by representatives of the Yugoslav leadership.

In 2018, it was announced that, 65 years after the abolition of Italian as the official language of the city, new Croatian-Italian bilingual signs will be placed back in the Fiume part of the modern united municipality.

[69] The terrain configuration, with mountains rising steeply just a few kilometres inland from the shores of the Adriatic, provides for some striking climatic and landscape contrasts within a small geographic area.

[82] A stylised version of Fiume during the 1920s was one of the main settings in the 1992 movie Porco Rosso by world acclaimed Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, as the town in front of which the fantastical "Hotel Adriano" is found and to which it is connected by a boat service taken by the protagonist.

[83] Bruce Sterling's November 2016 novel, written in collaboration with Warren Ellis, Pirate Utopia,[84] a dieselpunk alternative history, is set in Fiume (now Rijeka) in 1920 during the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro.

[89] Recently Rijeka - with its historic industrial sites, unusual hilly setting, sweeping views and retro architecture - has become a popular location for the filming of TV-advertisements.

[90][91] Bjelovar, Bjelovar-BilogoraSlavonski Brod, Brod-PosavinaDubrovnik, Dubrovnik-NeretvaPazin, Istria Karlovac, KarlovacKoprivnica, Koprivnica-KriževciKrapina, Krapina-ZagorjeGospić, Lika-Senj Čakovec, MeđimurjeOsijek, Osijek-BaranjaPožega, Požega-SlavoniaRijeka, Primorje-Gorski Kotar Sisak, Sisak-MoslavinaSplit, Split-DalmatiaŠibenik, Šibenik-KninVaraždin, Varaždin Virovitica, Virovitica-PodravinaVukovar, Vukovar-SrijemZadar, ZadarZagreb, Zagreb