ISONZO SOČA 1989 – 2025 A LONG ADVENTURE. DEDICATED TO DARIO STASI
by AGOSTINO COLLA
The magazine Isonzo Soča, founded in 1989 thanks to its creator and editor-in-chief Dario Stasi, ideally and economically supported by the publisher Transmedia in the person of Boris Peric, has opened, in complicated years full of expectations and hopes, a window on a known horizon, but unknown and misunderstood to most. She succeeded in her intent to make known a border reality until then ignored by most politicians, but not by the people who had always lived and shared here, precisely because they were mixed with dreams, and expectations. Not just a frontier magazine, therefore, but an instrument of knowledge and openness to the other, never so considered and known until then. A magazine that has had and has the merit of making known, to those who read it, the history, geography, arts and environment of these lands.
Lands unknown and little investigated to most, which then became, with the magazine, over the years, a means to understand the events of these places over time, discovering at the same time their richness, starting from the most remote antiquities up to the most recent history. A tool for reading our territory that had never had a specific interest in its enhancement. A journey that dates back to 35 years of historical, geopolitical and social investigations on a territory that has always shown its mixed-language value, where the people who have always insisted and lived in these territories have applied, perhaps even unconsciously, high forms of civil coexistence given by the human and social relationships that have been intertwined here over the centuries and that, especially during the cycle of the dramatic ‘900 they had to deal, in spite of themselves, with a long history of mourning and oppression due to Nazi-Fascist totalitarianism on the one hand and, after the Second World War, by the accession of Yugoslavia first to the Soviet bloc, then surpassed in belonging to the Non-Aligned bloc starting from 1948. Here, in these places, peaceful and constructive coexistence was daily bread. Here family ties, affections and work have always created those opportunities for civil coexistence that have, in fact, built the true fabric of our common territory over time.
The two cities – Nova Gorica and Gorizia – are to all intents and purposes at the ends of their respective territories of geographical and administrative competence, respectively Gorizia and Goriška. Two cities with common and very complex problems: health, environment, transport, logistics, land management, natural resources (read Isonzo). It will therefore become important, precisely from the perspective of GO2025, to address these critical issues with a synergistic spirit and approach. The reality of the facts, confirmed by the willingness of both parties to join a broad and articulated cultural event such as the one we will experience throughout 2025 is, without a doubt, preparatory to the realization of a common project. A community project that proceeds precisely in the intent that the European Union has achieved over the years, involving all the states that today form it. An opportunity for the future and an opportunity to be seized: people are prepared to do so, and they confirmed it with the massive participation in the inauguration, on 8 February, of GO2025. On their part, there is a willingness to take this step and to demand it from politics, which must do its part to deliver a noteworthy future to the next generations.
The spirit of this magazine has always been to overcome all those forms of obstruction and disinterest in all the events that have traced its history over the centuries. Something indefinite and indefinable to always push it in the opposite and opposite direction. Now, thanks to this spirit, the realization of these projects will become tangible and possible. On this occasion, a thought runs to the memory of our dear friend Dario Stasi. If GO2025 can establish itself as the European Capital of Culture, dear Dario, it will also owe it to people like you. To the ideas you wanted to affirm with your work, to your passion, your foresight and your dreams.
Thank you Dario.