Diego de Castro (born in 1907 in Piran) spent most of his childhood at the family estate in Savudrija. This is why the memories of this part of the pre-war municipality of Piran occupy a very important role in his autobiographical opus. In his “Memoirs of a Ninety-year old” (“Memorie di un novantenne”, 1999), where some of the best passages are dedicated to the descriptions of life in a family villa and its surroundings, he typically states: “I could go on, page after page, because the older you get the more vivid are the memories from childhood.” Savudrija is described as “locus amoenus”, “the place of beauty and primeval safety”, which he experienced as a child, encircled by family and many two- and four-legged friends in the years before the World War One, when this part of the world was ruled by the nationally heterogeneous and in many ways supranational Hapsburg empire. This “yesterday's world”, which – according to de Castro – resembled a simple idyll, saw a definite end with the outbreak of the World War One. With Italy's entry into war, the promontory closing the Gulf of Trieste overnight became, in the words of de Castro himself, “one of the strategically most important points of the Austro-Italian front”. In these and other memoirs of de Castro's it is possible to trace the waves of great historical changes through the prism of the small Savudrian microcosmos. In the twentieth century – the century of raging nationalisms and two world wars – these very changes thoroughly transformed the landscape of de Castro's childhood. As a grown-up he played an active and significant role in them himself, dealing with the post-war demarcation process between Italy and Yugoslavia.