After the Second World War, most of the region known as the Slovenian Littoral was transferred to Yugoslavia under the terms of the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947.
After being ceded from multiethnic Austria, the Italian nationalist milieus sought to make Trieste a città italianissima, committing a series of attacks led by Black Shirts against Slovene shops, libraries, lawyers' offices, and the central place of the rival community in the Trieste National Hall.
[7] Forced Italianization followed, and by the mid-1930s several thousand Slovenes, especially intellectuals from the Trieste region, emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and to South America.
Notable Slovenes affected by Italianization included the poet Srečko Kosovel and the writer Boris Pahor.
Slovenes that emigrated included the writers Vladimir Bartol and Josip Ribičič, the legal theorist Boris Furlan, and the architect Viktor Sulčič.