Tommaso Gulli Bust

Tommaso Gulli's death belongs to the unsettled aftermath of the First World War. Born in Faenza in 1879, he became an officer in the Italian navy and took command of the vessel Puglia in January 1920. The ship was stationed in the eastern Adriatic while the postwar territorial settlement remained disputed.

In July 1920 violence broke out in Split, then commonly called Spalato in Italian. Gulli and the sailor Aldo Rossi were mortally wounded. Accounts differ over the sequence of the confrontation, which involved Italian naval personnel and people in the city, so a simple account of an unprovoked attack does not capture the uncertainty of the evidence.

Italian nationalists used the deaths to intensify agitation over the Adriatic borderlands. The episode became part of the immediate background to the burning of the Slovene Narodni dom in Trieste. Commemoration of Gulli subsequently developed within that climate of rival national claims.

The bow of the Puglia was later installed at Gabriele D'Annunzio's Vittoriale. Both that display and Gulli's portrait show how naval objects and individual deaths acquired a political afterlife beyond the circumstances of the original incident.