Late journalist and Senator Dimitrij Volčič honoured in Gorizia
Gorizia, 17 January - The Italian city of Gorizia will honour Dimitrij Volčič (1931-2021), a journalist, senator and MEP of Slovenian descent, by naming a renovated platform in a public park after him, a Slovenian minority newspaper from Trieste reported on Friday.
The area with his name is located in Public Gardens, in whose vicinity Volčič lived for several years towards the end of his life.
A plaque with his name will be unveiled there next week, even before the city of Gorizia manages to formally rename the platform.
Volčič was born in Ljubljana to the parents from the region of Primorska, an area of Slovenia which came under Italy in the period between both world wars.
After the Second World War, he moved to Trieste with his parents. He died in 2021 in Gorizia.
He started his career as a sports journalist. From the mid-1960s, he worked for Italian public broadcaster RAI. In 1997, he was elected to the Italian Senate, where he played a decisive role in passing a law to safeguard the rights of Slovenians in Italy. In 1999, he was elected to the European Parliament on the list of the Italian Democratic Party.
In 2004, Slovenia decorated him with the Silver Order of Freedom for his efforts to develop Italian-Slovenian friendship and help enshrine the Slovenian ethnic minority's rights in a law.
The idea to honour him emerged when Volčič's book Straddling the Wall: My Days in East Europe was posthumously published in 2023, Livio Semolič of the SKGZ minority umbrella organisation told Primorski Dnevnik. Semolič, who co-edited the book, discussed the idea with Mayor Rodolfo Ziberna, who supported it.
The Dimitrij Volčič or Demetrio Volcic platform is located close to busts of Slovenian poet Simon Gregorčič (1844-1906) and architect Maks Fabiani (1865-1962).