Rijeka

 or Fiume ( Croatian pronunciation: [rijěːka] ( listen) ; Italian and Hungarian: Fiume [ˈfjuːme]; Slovene: Reka; German: Sankt Veit am Flaum; see other names) is the principal seaport and the third-largest city in Croatia (after Zagreb and Split). It is located in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County on Kvarner Bay, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea and has a population of 128,624 inhabitants (2011). The metropolitan area, which includes adjacent towns and municipalities, has a population of more than 240,000.

Quotes
« Fiume is the furthermost point of civilisation. »

Simple: Fiume was, in Stendhal's opinion, the easternmost point of the European civilisation which was near and easily comprehensible to his own French one.
 * Stendhal, famous 19th-century French writer (1831)

« Fiume c'est la lune! »

Simple: French prime minister wanted to externalise how Fiume, despite its small dimensions, became a topic of the utmost significance for the Italian public opinion and politicians during the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
 * Georges Clemenceau, French politician, physician, and journalist who was Prime Minister of France during the First World War (1919)

« Fiume, the city of life! »

Simple: The poet used this expression to incite the people of Fiume as well as Italy's one to passionately live the particular political season this part of Europe was living through in the period after WWI
 * Gabriele d'Annunzio, Italian poet, writer, adventurer and WWI hero, commander in chief during the Regency of Carnarno in Fiume (1919)

« Fiume might develop into an ideal land and offer an escape from the normal European misery and vulgarity. »

Simple: The sentence expresses the high hopes many people of culture had for the Fiume Commune to bring a wind of change to Italy and Europe as a whole.
 * Robert Sitwell, English writer (1920)

« Save only Barcelona, Fiume has the most excitable and irritable population of any city that I know »

Simple: Powell, visiting Fiume in the most turbulent years of its history, found the population extremely passionate in addressing various political causes.
 * E. Alexander Powell, American war correspondent and Major (1920)

« The port of love »

Simple: The author describes the youthful loves and energy that dominated Fiume in the time of the Regency of Carnaro and what it meant for his generation of adventurers in their early adulthood.
 * Giovanni Comisso, Italian writer (1924)

« Fiume, hearth and symbol of the Europe of the XXth century. »

Simple: Fiume being home to all major ethnic families in Europe and having experienced all European totalitarian regimes, is a symbol of the XX century.
 * Osvaldo Ramous, major Fiuman poet and writer

« Rijeka is a microcosm of the modern World »

Simple: One more quote that wants to explain how Fiume/Rijeka has contained in its small territory all the major ideological and cultural currents of the modern age.
 * Michael Ledeen, American philosopher and historian (1977)

« I was born in Fiume in 1917. My first word was spoken in Hungarian, my first sentence in Italian, my first song in Croatian. In Fiume I used to speak in Hungarian with my parents, in German with the housekeeper, Croatian with our waitress, in Italian with the school teacher and "in Fiuman with the muli when we were playing in the courtyeard". »

Simple: With this sentence, the author wanted to exemplify the incredible multi-culturality and capacity for everyday usage of multiple languages the old Fiuman population had before the exodus post-1947.
 * Miklós Vásárhelyi, famous Hungarian dissident and author

« Fiume has been what my Trieste has always wanted to be and often told itself to be: a true multicultural crucible. »

Simple: The author states that Fiume was the real melting pot of most Austro-Hungarian ethnicities and languages that Trieste was not able to become despite its major commercial importance.
 * Claudio Magris, Italian scholar, translator and major Mitteleuropean writer