My name is Mario and I was born in Rijeka, Yugoslavia on 17th May 1960. My father was then Yugoslavian and my mother, Italian. She was however from Rijeka - her parents having moved from Tuscany between World War I and World war II during a time when the Italian government wanted to create a huge Italian diaspora along the Eastern Adriatic coast in order to recapture the region which was once under Venetian rule.
I moved to Italy when I was 14 and lived there until 21 when I came to England where I now live with my Italian wife, but I still speak Croatian fluently, but NOT the shtokavian-ijekavian dialect of course! I have revisited Rijeka several times since Croatia's independence and actually hope to move back there. Never having been a citizen of an independent Croatia, I have never considered 'Croatian' as my nationality for many reasons, none political, merely realistic. If I am a Croat as opposed to a Yugoslav then my wife can only be classed as a Sicilian and not an Italian, why Sicilians, Neapolitans, Piedmontese, Venetians, Friulians, Tuscans (like my mother) all carry their communal names through history and have only been united with Italy since 1861 (not including Venice). They don't have the same traditions, languages (in the way that the former Yugoslav republics don't share one common language), nor interests. It is on a similar note that my father who still lives in Rijeka has declared his nationality Istrian and not Croatian; he is involved with the political movement hoping that Croatian Istria cede from Zagreb - from a Yugoslav in 1990 to an Istrian in 1992 - he skipped 'Croatian'. I myself am not too bothered, I declare my nationality as blank.
I will soon leave an e-mail address and people will be free to write to me at any time and can do so in English (of course), Croatian (or Serbian/Bosnian etc), Italian (standard or even Sicilian dialect) NOT Venetian as I don't understand it! I also speak quite a bit of French but am no fluent.
Coming soon.