The puppet
Independent State of Croatia ceded by the
Treaties of Rome of 18 May 1941, extensive
Adriatic coastal areas to the
Fascist Kingdom of Italy. The ruling Italian
National Fascist Party was a patron of
Croatian fascist
Ustasha Movement. Italy placed Ustasha leader
Ante Pavelić as the head of Croatian puppet State after the dissolution of
Yugoslavia in the
April War 1941. Among the ceded areas was the city of
Split in
Dalmatia. Italy created some provinces (administrative districts) in that region, that lasted until September 1943. One was the province of Spalato. The administrative capital was the city of Spalato (
Italian name for Split). The province had an area of 1,075 square kilometers and a population of 128,000 inhabitants. Most of the province's inhabitants were
Croats, but there were more than 3,000
Dalmatian Italians (in Split alone there were over 1,000 in 1940, even if very few in number compared to the mid-19th century, when they were over a third of the city's inhabitants). The island of
Lastovo, ceded after
World War I to Italy and renamed Lagosta, was united to the province. The Italians started immediately a process of improvement in the underdeveloped area, creating needed infrastructures from hospitals to schools and sewages. Under orders of
Mussolini, it was also started in July 1941 a process of forced
Italianization (related to the history of
Venetian Dalmatia). Because of this, in the end of summer 1941 there was a resistance movement of Croats against the Italian conquest, but without huge consequences until spring/summer 1943. Furthermore, in spring 1942 was created the football team
Associazione Calcio Spalato, that was ruled by the Italian
FIGC in the Italian championships. Meanwhile, in 1941 and 1942 many
Jews and some
Serbs took refuge in the city, escaping from the nearby regions ruled by the Croatian
Ustaše. In September 1943 the German army took control of the region from the Italians, who had surrendered to the
Allies, and soon started a terrible guerrilla war between the German occupiers and
Josip Broz Tito's partisans. The province was cancelled in the same September and later annexed to
Ante Pavelić's puppet Croatia. ==Administrative subdivision==