Treaty of Rapallo (1920)

In November 1920, Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) sent their delegations to Rapallo to resolve the border dispute that had festered since the end of WWI. The Treaty of Rapallo, signed at the Palazzo Municipale on the main corso, settled the fate of Istria, Dalmatia, and the contested city of Fiume — contentious issues that had brought the nationalist firebrand Gabriele D'Annunzio and his private army to occupy Fiume for over a year.

The treaty is one of two major international agreements to bear the town's name — the other being the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and the Soviet Union, also signed here. Both brought Rapallo a brief moment of geopolitical significance that sits oddly with its present identity as a quiet seaside resort. A plaque on the Palazzo Municipale marks the 1920 signing.

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The treaty resolved one of the most contentious territorial disputes to emerge from WWI: the status of Fiume, Dalmatia, and the Istrian coast. Italy had been promised significant Adriatic territories in the 1915 Treaty of London but received far less at the Paris Peace Conference, fuelling the nationalist outrage that Mussolini would later exploit. The Rapallo settlement, negotiated over three days in November 1920, created the short-lived Free State of Fiume and drew boundaries that held, more or less, until WWII.