Ivan Pauletta

Pauletta was born in the municipality of Medulin, in the southern part of Istrian peninsula, then part of the Kingdom of Italy. He lived in Ventimiglia until 1946, near Italian border with France, where his father had job at Italian customs. He graduated in mechanical engineering in 1964 in Zagreb, Croatia, then part of the SFR Yugoslavia.

In 1982 Pauletta became a member of the Joint Council of Croat parliament in the SFR Yugoslavia. He continued to deal with politics in a local newspaper in Rijeka, with which he began to collaborate in 1988. In 1990 he was among the founders of the Istrian Democratic Assembly, a political party founded on the eve of first multi-party elections in democratic Croatia.^[1] In the same year he went to Italy to work and returned to Croatia in 1993, where he would join the Croatian Parliament. In 1993 he became a deputy of the Sabor and in 1997 he retired from politics to pursue writing.^[2]

He is also known for the project "Terra d'Istria", or "Histria Terra", which claims an even greater autonomy of Istria from the central government of Zagreb. However, the project was never carried out, and it was indeed a reason for harsh criticism of Pauletta, accused of being an irredentist close to Italian far-right circles.

In the following years after bachelor's degree, he made scientific publications regarding mechanical engineering, and he worked as an occasional teacher at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In his career he then ranged from craftsman to worker, from director of a factory in Pula that supplied souvenir producers in Medjugorje, to politician and member of the Croatian parliament.

At the end of 1999 he published his first book "Histria Collage" or "Histrija Kolaz" in both languages: Italian and Croat. In 2005 he published his second book "The fugitive". With a group of authors in 2007, he published a monograph about Medulin. His other book is titled "Stories of Istria", published in 2009.^[3]