The city that the Iron Curtain split in two — now reunited with its Slovenian twin as a European Capital of Culture, and surrounded by Collio wine country
Gorizia is an Italian city on the Slovenian border in Friuli Venezia Giulia — its twin city Nova Gorica lies directly across a street that was, until 2004, a Cold War border crossing. The Iron Curtain ran through the middle of the urban fabric: streets, neighbourhoods, and cemeteries were divided by wire and concrete from 1947 until Slovenia joined the Schengen Area. The physical reunification of the two cities — visible in the removal of the last border checkpoint at Piazza Transalpina/Trg Evrope (where the border literally crossed the square) — is one of the more poignant stories in post-Co…
Gorizia was the capital of the County of Gorizia, a Habsburg crownland, from the 12th century until 1918 — a prosperous, multilingual city with a significant Slovenian-speaking majority and Italian and German minorities. The Treaty of Paris (1947) drew the postwar border straight through the city, assigning the eastern half (Nova Gorica) to Yugoslavia and leaving Gorizia's western quarter in Italy. For the next 57 years, the two halves of the same city were separated by Cold War barriers — families were divided, businesses split, cemeteries partitioned. The 2001 Schengen expansion began the p…