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4: CASE STUDY 1: THE ITALIAN/SLOVENIAN BORDER
Figure 34: Barbed wire across the roads San Gabriele/Erjavčeva ulica in the 1950s. Property of
Musei provinciali di Gorizia, Italy.
Even in places where material remains of the border itself do not linger to
inform us about their previous presence we can still be reminded of its
location through the imprint it has made on the landscape. Looking at Google
Earth it is often easy to trace the line of the border even without the actual
borderline superimposed. The cut-off point between two states can in this
way often be seen through the changes it has made in the landscape, for
example through different agricultural use. The agricultural fields around San
Pietro/Šempeter, for example, clearly show the variation between the fields on
the Slovenian and the Italian side where the border cuts through what was
previously larger fields creating smaller and less regular fields around the
border line itself. In other places it is represented by a previous road since
discontinued on the other side of the border. This is the case near the village
of San Pietro the Italian version of Šempeter, located just across the border.
The two parts of what used to be one village was previously connected with a
road that has since become redundant (Figure 36).
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