The master's thesis will deal with the fundamental historical aspects discussed and narrated in the novel Il cavallo di cartapesta by Osvaldo Ramous. The thesis will be based on the analysis of the novel and all the historical events that Ramous describes in it. The intention is to make a comparison between the historical aspects narrated in the novel and the historical data collected by historiographies, mainly Italian and Croatian ones. The novel is structured in two parts and the protagonist is Roberto Badìn, Ramous' alter ego. Always using the third person singular, and therefore seeking the maximum impersonality, in the first part of the novel the author describes the beginning of the First World War, the social aspects of the war, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the episode with Riccardo Zanella and concludes by mentioning only D'Annunzio's feat. For the part that describes the assassination of the emperor, the way in which the people in Rijeka react to the event that happened, learned from the newspapers, will be analyzed and explained, not imagining that there would soon be a world war. The thesis, in this part, will also deal with the repercussions of the war and summarize Ramous' descriptions of what happens both with the city (the true protagonist of the work) and with its inhabitants. In analyzing the second part of the novel, which begins in 1943 when Roberto is forty years old and lives with the Jewish Clara, I will describe the position of the Jews during the Second World War in Rijeka, that is, Clara's disappearance and the different ways in which interpret his character. Finally, the great exodus of the Italian population described by the author will be analyzed by supporting it with the data reported by the official Croatian and Italian historiography. The intent of the research is to define to what extent the historical truth fictionalized by Ramous is to be considered a reliable and important contribution in the reconstruction of the history of Fiume, a singular border city.