PORTOROŽ, Slovenia — “Wait until you find out how everyone in my family has come from a different country,” says Alex Zigante on a recent summer afternoon.
Zigante, a 30-year-old engineer, takes a breath and lays out the family tree: His great-grandmother, Angela, was born in Austria-Hungary. His grandmother, Maria, 90, in Italy. His father, Aldo, 61, in Yugoslavia. And Alex was born and raised in Slovenia.
And yet, all of them have lived their lives here in Portorož, a seaside village in what is now southwestern Slovenia, where the family’s roots go back centuries to the Venetian Empire, and where their modest three-story home has been a fixed point on an ever-changing map.
How has one family managed to live in four different countries while remaining in the same house generation after generation?
“The world was changing even when our home was still,” Alex said.
Here on the western shores of the Istrian Peninsula, where the Adriatic Sea divides Italy from Central Europe, a century’s worth of wars and revolutions has left behind a community for whom national identity is often a mere matter of politics.
Every nation that came to power here during the 20th century imposed new customs and laws on the people, said Mila Orlić, a professor of history at the University of Rijeka, in Croatia, who has studied identity and collective memory on the Istrian Peninsula. “But the local population often adapted and even showed willingness to identify in different ways depending on the situation,” she said.
For the Zigantes, the only constant as borders have shifted around them and armies have come and gone has been this home.
The white house with boxy windows and square angles blends into the landscape, tucked behind some trees on a residential street. But a closer look reveals how it has evolved over the years, with multiple entrances marking the various front doors from iterations past.
On a recent tour, Aldo Zigante, a redheaded former tennis coach with a mellow nature, walked through the damp stonewalled workshop that formed the initial structure. He pointed out the changes in the home, including the most recent addition, the top floor, where he and his wife, Damjana, live.
“This home has a lot of history — some would say too much,” said Aldo, a child of the Cold War who grew up speaking the Istrian dialect at home, Italian at school, and Slovene around town. “But that’s true of a lot of the homes in Portorož. A lot of these homes have more of a history than you would think.”
Like most who lived in this pastoral region in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Zigantes subsisted for generations on farming the hillsides that descend toward Portorož’s seaside promenade. During the 19th century, the family used the land as a workshop and built a bare-bones home that gradually expanded along with the family.
Aldo’s grandmother, Angela, was born here in 1912, speaking Italian in what was then Austria-Hungary. From there, the timeline becomes almost impossibly complicated, explained Jože Pirjevec, a prominent historian on the region: After World War I, the empire gave way to the Kingdom of Italy, then to a German occupation zone during World War II, then for a brief period to Yugoslav partisans, then to an Anglo-American and Yugoslav military occupation, then to the short-lived Free Territory of Trieste, then back to Italy, then to Yugoslavia, and finally to postcommunist Slovenia.
Along the way, deep divisions were ingrained in the people of Portorož. Neighbors often became foes. Families spoke different languages. For significant periods, the Zigantes lived in their house in a state of fear, anticipating a knock at the door that could mean their destruction. Maria recalled the day such a knock came.
“I remember that night still today, like a nightmare that never disappears,” Maria said, in Italian, as she sat at a wood picnic table on the patio of the home. Lush green leaves hung from the pergola and swayed in the breeze coming off the Adriatic, just out of view.
One night in 1950, when Maria was 15, she was startled awake by a commotion outside her bedroom. “A group of men were shouting and banging on the front door,” she recalled. “They were calling for my father, demanding that he come outside.”
She was trembling in her nightgown, and for good reason. In 1950, being Italian in Portorož was dangerous.
When she was born, Portorož was controlled by Italy and its fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, and for ethnic Italians like Maria, it was a relatively comfortable period. The town transformed into a luxurious spa resort reserved for wealthy Italians, who filled the palatial Grand Hotel and its thermal baths. But it wouldn’t last.
During World War II, the Istrian Peninsula became a tug-of-war between the Axis powers and the communist-led Yugoslav partisan insurgency. After Mussolini and the fascists were defeated, the area briefly charted its own statehood as the Free Territory of Trieste. The territory was then subdivided, with one part administered by Anglo-American forces, and the other, including Portorož, controlled by Yugoslavia.
The fragile arrangement created fertile ground for horrors like the one Maria experienced at the house that night in 1950.
With Yugoslavia at the helm, around 250,000 ethnic Italians were evicted from the Adriatic coastal region, and thousands more were killed, according to Gustavo Corni, a historian, in the 2011 book “The Disentanglement of Populations.”
“The bad people in some cases were your neighbors,” said Aldo’s sister, Lorella. “It was a very dangerous period.”
Maria believed that the Yugoslav partisans shouting for her father that night intended to force the family out of town, or kill them. Just up the coast, the limestone caves and chasms at the Karst plateau had become the site of executions, Pirjevec said.
As the soldiers banged on their door, Maria said she heard one of them order the others to stop. “He’s one of the good ones,” she said the man shouted. The posse left and carried on to the next house.
“Everyone knew my dad,” Maria said. “He used to play cards at the osterias, and people liked him. But all around here they simply took the land from people, and you had to stay shut up about it because there was nothing you could do about it. So we never knew if our home would still be ours.”
The family were now part of the “Italian minority”: the ones who stayed. It was during this time that Portorose — the “port of roses,” in Italian — took the Slavic spelling: Portorož. And another era began.
By the 1960s, when Aldo and his sisters Nadja, Laura and Lorella, were growing up in Portorož, the house was still in communist Yugoslavia.
“They were terrible times, the years I was growing up here,” said Nadja, 65, on a recent afternoon.
The siblings attended an Italian school, while most of the local children attended Yugoslavian schools — sometimes by force. “I remember when we would walk from this home to school, people would shout at us, ‘Fascists!’ because we spoke Italian,” Nadja said. “It was terrible, because you were afraid to speak your own language. So you tried to always whisper so no one would hear.”
Many of the remaining Italians preferred to assimilate, sending their children to Slavic schools where they could assume a new national identity. The Zigantes’ safe space was always the white house. “We always spoke Italian at home,” Nadja recalled.
The house was an island in a sea of strangers, but they refused to abandon it. In the family lore, they refer to their “stubbornness” as a badge of honor.
Unlike in Croatia and Bosnia, the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s didn’t ravage Slovenia’s coastal region. The Zigante house was never damaged, as many homes farther down the coast were. Afterward, Portorož’s tourism and gambling industries rebounded quickly. Tourists returned to enjoy the seaside.
The town rebranded itself as Slovenian, though a movement sprang up to collectively commemorate the Italian experience.
“To me, it’s always been normal to speak Italian, including at home, and to have that be part of your identity,” said Paola Valenta, 25, who works with the Youth Association of the Italian National Community, a group that promotes understanding of the experience of the local Italians. (Alex Zigante is also a member.)
“It’s a very complicated history, and people had different kinds of losses,” she said. “Some lost their family members, some lost their land, some lost their language, and many people lost their homes. So we are now trying to help reconcile those experiences.”
Alex and his grandmother, Maria, have started a digital project called “I’ve Made You Something To Eat,” featuring videos of local grandparents preparing heritage dishes, many of which blend Venetian, Italian, Austrian and Slavic cuisines.
“I didn’t have to live through what the other generations of my family lived through,” said Alex. “This is my way of paying respect to what they have survived.”
His aunt Nadja says that Alex’s generation “has been more fortunate,” and marvels at how he is able to navigate across identities without fear, speaking Italian one moment, Slovenian the next, and English at work.
By the late 1990s, she said, “there was already an awareness of multiculturalism, and multilingualism had become something to value, not condemn. Now, the more languages you speak, the better, right?”
Alex, though, isn’t sure if he will raise a family in Portorož. He may be pushed out by yet another sweeping force: skyrocketing home prices brought on by tourism and Airbnbs. “If you don’t have property you’re inheriting from the family, you really can’t afford it,” he said. Even the Zigantes have leveraged the popularity of Portorož: Beside the home, in a small guesthouse, they rent out rooms in the summertime.
Priced out of Portorož, and with the family home fully occupied, Alex recently bought a flat in Trieste, an Italian city across the border. But he’s confident the house will remain with the family, either when he or his cousins return, sometime in the future.