The foibe are, most literally, sinkholes. Often hundreds of meters deep, these shafts pockmark the borderlands between Italy and the former Yugoslavia. For centuries, the foibe in these provinces, known as the Julian March, were used to dispose of waste. In two World Wars, they filled up with destroyed equipment and dead horses — but also human bodies. Today, the word foibe is most habitually used to evoke murdered Italians thrown into these shafts.

February 10 is the anniversary of the Allies’ 1947 Paris peace treaty with Italy, which had to  hand these border territories to Yugoslavia, after Fascism’s failed attempt to dismember that country. Since 2005, this date has also been an official Remembrance Day marked by the Italian Republic. Each February 10, institutional figures and memorial groups meet at the foiba in Basovizza, just outside Trieste, to honor Italians killed by Yugoslav partisans, as well as those who left Yugoslav-annexed areas over the following decade.

After rising historical research starting in the 1980s, in recent decades the foibe killings have become a central focus of Italian public debate. The dissolution of the Italian Communist Party in 1991, the rise of Berlusconian right-wing politics, but also the breakup of Yugoslavia, all troubled antifascist narratives and fed a rival focus on “the defeated,” whose side of the story was exalted in schlocky but mass-market pop-history books. Last week, Giorgia Meloni’s government announced the foundation of a new, public-funded museum in Rome, honoring foibe victims’ memory.