Italian protectorate of Albania

‘They are Humans’: Albania Memorializes Dramatic Exodus to Italy

This wasn't the first mass escape from Albania. A few months before, on March 6, 1991, several thousand more Albanians reached Italy after seizing cargo ships in the ports.

A year earlier, on July 1990, some 5,000 others took refuge in foreign embassies in the capital, Tirana. Thousands more crossed the land border to Greece.