You could call them a footnote in history. Grey-haired now and ageing, they refuse to accept their fate, refuse to accept that their individual destinies were overwhelmed by the violent drama of the second World War. "They" are the esuli, Italian exiles from Istria, Dalmatia and Fiume, the bitter survivors of a 1947 exodus from a prewar homeland which now forms part of Slovenia and Croatia. Last Sunday 5,000 esuli gathered in Piazza dell'Unita in Trieste, close to Italy's frontier with Slovenia, to appeal for "justice" and restitution for confiscated goods and lands.
They were addressed by the Minister for Telecommunications, Antonio Maccanico, who had been sent on a thankless diplomatic mission by the centre-left government of Romano Prodi. He was there to explain why Italy now supports Slovenia's candidacy for EU membership and Croatia's moves towards stronger links with western Europe.
Put another way, the minister was there to explain why the esuli are one footnote in history that modern Italy and its ex-Yugoslav Republic neighbours have by and large agreed to ignore.
When Mr Maccanico began to speak of Slovenia's "decisive steps" in the direction of the EU and NATO and of Croatia's "pro-European choices", he was shouted down. Four politicians, two from the ex-fascist Alleanza Nazionale and two from Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, began to heckle Mr Maccanico.
Wresting the microphone from him, they broke into an impromptu version of Va'pensiero, a chorus which curiously manages to symbolise both Italian unity for the exiles and Padanian independence for Senator Bossi and his followers.
Last Sunday's scuffle in Trieste is merely a postscript to the footnote. The history of Istria, Dalmatia and Fiume and their mixed Italian and Slovene populations is long and complicated. Once part of the "Serenissima Repubblica" of Venice, this hinterland area around Trieste passed under Italian control at the end of the first World War, before being consigned to Marshal Tito's communist Yugoslavia by the 1947 treaty after the second World War.
Italy was stripped of all its colonies in 1947, and condemned to pay $360 million (£240 million) in reparation to the USSR, Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania and Ethiopia. All of that seemed bitter enough medicine, but the handover of the Istrian peninsula was more traumatic. Even Trieste itself was not immediately restored to Italian control, being governed by an Allied military executive until 1955.
Three hundred and fifty thousand Istrians, Fiumians and Dalmatians opted to leave their homeland in 1947 - out of a sense of Italian ethnocentricity and partly through fear of what might happen to them under the Tito regime.
Another 50,000 of their compatriots chose to remain, with many suffering violent reprisals from Tito troops keen to wreak vengeance for the injustices suffered under Nazi-fascist oppression. As many as 6,000 Istrians may have been summarily executed and dumped in communal graves in the Carso hills during the immediate post-war period.
The 350,000 exiles went first to Trieste, and many of them were then moved into 109 camps up and down the Italian peninsula. From there many emigrated, forming part of the huge Italian diaspora.
The survivors of the 1947 exodus and their relatives, however, have not forgotten. They cannot turn back the clock of history, but they want compensation. Alleanza Nazionale has regarded them sympathetically, and the party even used its power as a component of the short-lived Berlusconi government to have Italy block Slovenia's request to be considered for EU membership in 1994.
That EU veto has long since been removed by both the Dini and current Prodi governments, keen to develop good diplomatic and trade relations with its closest Adriatic neighbours.
On Sunday the esuli spoke of the need to rewrite history, to denounce the "ethnic cleansing" of which they were victims and to be compensated for their losses. Even in a rewritten history, however, they will be merely a footnote, indirect victims of the evils of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship.