ostilities (a similar situation occurred in South Tyrol). Trieste was officially annexed to the Kingdom of Italy only with the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920. Immediately a policy of "deslavification" started with the Italianisation of the Slovene toponyms. The region reorganized under a new administrative unit, known as the Julian March (Venezia Giulia)
The Narodni dom, Slovene Hall of Trieste, burned down by the Fascist squads in 1920
The union to Italy, however, brought a loss of importance to the city, as the new state border deprived it of its former hinterland. The Slovene ethnic group (around 25% of the population according to the 1910 census) suffered persecution by rising Italian Fascism. The period of violent persecution of Slovenes began with riots in April 13, 1920, which were organized as a retaliation for the assault on Italian occupying troops in Split by the local Croatian population. Many Slovene-owned shops and buildings were destroyed during the riots, which culminated when a group of Italian Fascists, led by Francesco Giunta, burned down the Narodni dom ("National House"), the community hall of Trieste's Slovenes.
After the emergence of the Fascist regime in 1922, an official policy of Italianization continued. Public use of the Slovene language was prohibited, by 1927 all Slovene associations were dissolved, while names and surnames of Slavic and German origin were Italianized by the end of 1930. Several thousand Slovenes from Trieste, especially intellectuals, emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and to South America, where many became prominent in their field. Among the notable Slovene émigrés from Trieste were the writers Vladimir Bartol and Josip Ribičič, the legal theorist Boris Furlan, and the architect Viktor Sulčič. Meanwhile several thousands ethnic Italians from Dalmatia moved to Trieste from the newly created Yugoslavia.
In the late 1920s, Yugoslav irredentism started to appear, and the Slovene militant
