Giusepppe Cobolli Gigli (born in Trieste in 1892 - death unknown) was an Italian politician, member of Benito Mussolini's fascist government from 1935 to 1939 as minister of Public Works.
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According to Pietro Valente, Cobolli Gigli was born from Nicholas Cobol (Koper 1861 - Trieste 1931), elementary school teacher, to which Trieste has dedicated a Karst trail (theNapoleon) for his creation of municipal recreation centers during the Habsburg times. The name was later changed to Cobolli during the Fascism. The addition of Gigli to the surname may be related to the experience of irredentist fighting during the First World War. The unredeemed volunteer fighters in the Italian Army assumed a battle pseudonym to protect their families, and many joined it, as the war was over, to their last name, as element of honor[1] Again according to Valente, the children of Joseph Cobolli Gigli would be:
Other sources, less detailed, reported Cobolli Gigli as stemmic from a slavic family. According to Giacomo Scotti,[2] "Giuseppe Cobolli Gigli, a minister of Public Works of the fascist era, son of Nikolaus Combol, Slovenian primary school teacher, born in 1863, the last name italianized spontaneously in 1928, since 1919 had given himself a pseudonym patriotic, Giulio Italico. Then when he became a fascist leader, he took a second surname, Gigli, giving itself a touch of nobility. " According to Federico Vincenti, the father of Cobolli Gigli was the Slovenian Nikolaus Kobolj[3] According to Claudio Sommaruga, Cobolli Gigli was the son of an elementary school teacher Nicholas Cobol, from Koper, and he first assumed the pseudonym of "Giulio Italico"[4][5] until Italianizing it in 1928 in the name Cobolli, and after becoming hierarch adding a second surname, Gigli.[5]
Engineer, after having fought as irredentist in the First World War, he began his political career in the fascist movement in 1919, by producing under the pseudonym Giulio Italico the brochure Trieste, faithful of Rome".[1]
As a fascist ideologue,Giuseppe Cobol[6] wrote in the journal Gerarchia; in September 1927, in an article entitled " Fascism and the aliens ", as reported by Giacomo Scotti, Cobolli Gigli theorized the ethnic cleansing of Venezia Giulia, by replacing the 'alien' populations with native Italian settlers from other provinces the Kingdom. In the same article about Pazin, he reported that "The village lies on the edge of an abyss which the muse called foiba, a worthy place of burial for those who, in the province, threaten with bold claims the national characteristics of Istria.".[2]
From September 5, 1935 till October 31, 1939, Cobolli Gigli was Minister of Public Works in Benito Mussolini's government, overseeing the great works carried out in the Italian colonies, a subject upon which he wrote the book Imperial Roads, published in 1938. He specialized in the development of road network in Ethiopia.