In 2025, Nova Gorica and Gorizia share the title of European Capital of Culture, the first time the honour has been granted jointly to cities in two countries. Under the slogan GO!
Borderless, the Slovenian and Italian twins are using a cultural programme to treat the frontier not as a wound, but as a meeting line. In an era in which borders dominate political speeches, this choice feels almost radical in its normality.
A Frontier Turned Inside Out
For much of the twentieth century, this was a hard border.
After the Second World War, the Paris Peace Treaty split historic Gorizia in two; the Yugoslav side built planned Nova Gorica as a new regional centre, whilst the Italian side kept the old town.
Concrete posts and fences ran through streets and gardens. Families lived within sight of each other but needed permits and long detours to meet. For those who remember it, the line was not an abstract border on a map, but something that cut directly through everyday life.
For many older residents, the EU and the Schengen area did not feel abstract; they meant finally crossing a once-forbidden line as if it were any other pavement. The 2025 title builds on that history and suggests that cultural policy can do more than decorate a logo; it can help turn a place of division into somewhere recognisably shared.
Stages, galleries and open-air events are spread across both sides, and visitors move freely without realising they have entered another state. Culture here is less a slogan and more a daily practice of walking across what used to be a checkpoint, a quiet argument in favour of lived openness over symbolic walls.
Daily Life on a Former Border
Everyday life already stretches across the line. Many households mix Italian and Slovene, and commutes ignore the frontier as a legal fact.
Cafés in one town serve regulars from the other, and joint institutions manage public transport and planning. The Capital of Culture year amplifies these habits rather than inventing them, placing funding and visibility behind a way of living that residents have already tested for years.
Projects pair schools, choirs and local associations across the two municipalities. For residents who remember watchtowers, seeing children rehearse plays on both sides of the square carries its own quiet weight and shows how quickly a hard border can soften once people are allowed to treat it as a street crossing.
Not everything blends easily. Economic conditions still differ, and some locals worry that rising visibility will bring speculative tourism before wages catch up. The year of events cannot erase the memory of past borders, but it can give residents a chance to decide how much of that past they wish to keep in view, instead of having it decided for them in distant capitals.
Softening Through Routine
Towns along the Mediterranean live with sharp lines between safe and unsafe movement. Here, the frontier softens through routine rather than speeches. That may not sound grand, but routine is often what makes politics believable.
The twin towns also offer a quiet response to louder debates about walls, fences and identity. GO! Borderless does not claim that borders have vanished; customs officers and national laws still exist.
It instead shows how culture, language and work can ignore some of the divisions that politics reinforces. From a distance, the 2025 title might look like another EU branding exercise.
Up close, it is more modest and more interesting. It is about buses that run across a line that once needed armed guards, about school trips that no longer involve passports, and about neighbours who argue over parking spaces instead of passports. This is not a utopia, but it is a reminder that coexistence often looks ordinary rather than heroic.
If this experiment succeeds, its most lasting effect may not be a festival or a museum, but something smaller. A generation that grows up treating a former frontier as a shared town centre will carry that habit elsewhere, long after the banners come down, and that is a quiet but valuable form of political education.
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