As early as the 1950s, several million people a year were crossing the Italian–Yugoslav border, primarily local residents, but also farmers who went to cultivate land on the other side. Trade between the two countries was already well developed at the time: each side bought goods and products from the other.
In the early 1960s, the era of shopping trips to Trieste began, lasting until the late 1980s. This border city, economically underdeveloped, turned into the first address of the West for the citizens of communist Yugoslavia.
Every day, more than 20,000 citizens of the former Yugoslavia would crowd the streets of Trieste, and on weekends that number could rise to as many as 100,000. Around four billion dinars were spent in Trieste daily, and about 1.5 trillion annually. Everything was bought—from car parts to clothing. Most of all, however, jeans and coffee.
Some statistics show that buyers from SFR Yugoslavia purchased between 60,000 and 65,000 pairs of jeans per week during 1977 and 1978. That amounts to more than three million pairs per year. But people also went to Trieste to buy flip-flops, sweaters, leather jackets, Zippo lighters, and even records—essentially everything that could not be found in Belgrade department stores.
At the time, it was legal to take dinars out of Yugoslavia only up to the equivalent of 150 U.S. dollars, so hundreds of thousands of people developed their own systems for transferring money across the border. For a while, money was smuggled in thermos flasks.
