Trentino

“ The Punta Trubinesca, a noble peak, which, seen from Monte Generoso, heads the army of the Rhætian Alps, has been but once ascended, although it is accessible to anybody who can cross the Diavolezza Pass or climb the Titlis. In the highlands of Lombardy and the Trentino—speaking roughly, the country between Lago di Como and Trent—Italy and Switzerland seem to join hands. There, under an Italian sky and girt round by southern flowers and foliage, the fantastic rock-ridges and mighty towers of the Brenta stand opposite the broad snow-plains of the Adamello. ”

“ The Trentino is, together with the Upper Adige, a part of a compact geographical region, more particularly called Venezia Tridentina. It is formed by the southern part of the old Austrian province of Tyrol; it is bounded on the north by the watershed line of the Central-Oriental Alps. The waters that run to the north find their outlet in the Black Sea. The waters that run to the south, are all tributaries of the Adige River, which eventually finds its outlet in the Adriatic. It belongs, therefore, geographically to Northern Italy. ”

“ No one who knows Trent can question the justice of Italy's claims to the city and to the rich valleys surrounding it, for the history, the traditions, the language, the architecture and the art of this region are as characteristically Italian as though it had never been outside the confines of the kingdom. The system of mild and fertile Alpine valleys which compose the so-called Trentino have an area of about 4,000 square miles and support a population of 380,000 inhabitants, of whom 375,000, according to a census made by the Austrians themselves, are Italian. ”

“ He put reality above appearance, action before words, and made sacrifice to an ideal the constant vocation of his life. We do not know which to praise more — his strong will or his spirit of self-denial; both qualities are equalled only by his intense love for the poor, the humble, the toiler, and his pure love of his native Trentino and mother Italy. His nationalism was not jingoism, but blended harmoniously with the high aspirations and ideals of a sane socialism. ”

“ Very important in Trentino, as well as in the Alto Adige, is the tourist industry, for tourists come here in summer as well as in winter, to enjoy the beauty of the landscape and to climb the celebrated mountains, especially the Dolomites. ”

“ No other British troops, except these three Batteries of ours, ever fought in the Trentino. It was a proud distinction and a very memorable experience. The natural scenery was superb, a series of great mountain ranges, uneven lines of jagged peaks, enclosing deep cut valleys, the lower slopes of the mountains densely wooded, the higher levels bare precipitous rock. The Austrian front line ran along one ridge of peaks and ours along another; between ran a deep valley, all No Man's Land, into which patrols used to climb down at night, often with the aid of ropes. ”

“ In the Trentino the population is exclusively and completely Italian. Its surface is 6,356 square kilometers and the resident population in 1910 was 386,437, with an average of 61 inhabitants for each square kilometer.
On the contrary, the population is mixed with prevalence of the German element in the territory of the Upper Adige, which has a surface of 7,178 square kilometers. It is largely a mountainous country, and not very productive, it had in 1910 a resident population of 243,503 with an average of 33.7 inhabitants for each square kilometer. ”

“ No matter what his name, be he the heir to the throne or someone else responsible for this policy of compression against Trentino, of waste and danger for all the people of Austria, no matter who the man, he is in reality irresponsible, insane, a man destined for the mad-house. We, therefore, rebel in the name of civilization and humanity and demand that such government be brought to an end ”

“ It is as a whole a wide sunny valley, rich in fields of maize and vines, and crowded with prosperous villages overlooked by the ruins of mediæval fortresses. Two of its side-glens, Val di Pejo and Val di Rabbi, penetrate deeply into the Orteler range, and the bath-houses they contain have a local fashion amongst the people of the hotter parts of the Trentino ”

“ Even the architecture changes, the slender, four-square campaniles surmounted by bulging Byzantine domes, so characteristic of the Trentino, giving place to pointed steeples faced with colored slates or tiles. On the German side the towns are better kept, the houses better built, the streets wider and cleaner than in the Italian districts. Instead of the low, white-walled, red-tiled dwellings so characteristic of Italy, the houses begin to assume the aspect of Alpine chalets, with carved wooden balconies and steep-pitched roofs to prevent the settling of the winter snows. ”

“ One of the German deputies, undoubtedly a direct ancestor of the present Boche, explained his vote thus: "I wear German spectacles, and therefore see the world as German.... I only say: Beati possidentes. We have southern Tyrol (as the Germans called Trentino) , and therefore we shall keep it. That is how I understand the right of the people! Nor do I think that I am asking too much when I propose the expulsion of these Trentino deputies who, with their request for separation, have pronounced their own death sentence....." ”

“ The political and national struggle in Trentino grew ever more difficult and intense. The existing Pan-Germanic societies redoubled their aggressive and corruptive activities; new societies sprang up disguised under Italian names, while the authorities showed more and more openly that they favored the Germanization movement; on demand of the militarists Trentino was transformed into one great fortress and three-fourths of the military force of the province (more than an army corps) was removed to Trentino. ”

“ The southern portion of Tirol—the so-called Trentino, the district round the town of Trent—is purely Italian by race, and its union with the kingdom of Italy has long been the chief point in the programme of the Italian Irredentists or extreme Nationalists. It is a poor and mountainous country, which belongs geographically to its southern rather than to its northern neighbour. The pronouncedly Italian sympathies of its inhabitants have complicated the problem of government and have been a permanent source of friction between Austria and Italy. ”

“ In this sector of the Front the most important operations in the Trentino were taking place, and the Austrians were straining every nerve in order to stay the victorious progress of the Italians, but the lightning rapidity of their advance had proved irresistible, and had forced a retirement to their second line. ”

“ Wearisome work, mostly obscure, difficult, hardly understood, often opposed by the public, which allowed itself to be won, little by little, by this great fighter. It was only recently, just before the war, that Battisti became probably the most universally beloved man in Trentino, particularly by the young men, who saw in him the esthetic embodiment of the ideal of their youth and of the highest spirit of their country.
He entered Trentino public life as a socialist. Who was not a socialist in Italy between the years 1893 and 1898? ”

“ In Trentino itself, despite the suspicious vigilance of Austria, Battisti's cult soon spread. Effigies of the hero so often found sewed in the garments of the people, between the cloth and the lining, bear witness to this. ”

“ But the whole Italian slope is free at all times from the alleged defects of Swiss scenery. Further east lies the Trentino, where the mountains stand apart and the valleys spread out to an ampler width, where nature is rich and open-handed, and the landscapes unite 340 Alpine nobility of form to the sunny spaciousness and deep colour of Italy. And close at hand, beyond the Adige, is the country of Titian, where the new school may find a precedent and an example in the great painter of Cadore. ”

“ This is true of Trentino operations now, and the enemy has many more roads at his disposal than the old maps show. Sometimes I wonder whether the Italians do not immerse themselves a little too much in these means of war and lose sight a little of the ends, but over nine-tenths of Italy's frontier the war is Alpine, and it must be allowed that Italian soldiers have brought the art of mountain fighting to a degree of perfection which it has never attained before. ”

“ As one passes up the valley one appreciates that on their left wing the Italians have position after position in the spurs of the mountains before they could be driven into the plain. If the Austrians could reach the plain it would be to their own ruin, for the Italians have large reserves. There is no need for any anxiety about the Trentino.
The attitude of the people behind the firing line should give one confidence. I had heard that the Italians were a nervous people. It does not apply to this part of Italy. ”

“ We are still uncertain about the number of those who shared the fate of our great hero and martyr, Cesare Battisti.
All the political parties of the Trentino have always been staunch defenders of the national principle. For having refused to bow to Austria's will, which amounted to renouncing his ideals, the Prince Bishop of Trento, Monsignor Endrici, who can be compared to Cardinal Mercier for nobility and loftiness of character, was interned in a monastery near Vienna, and forbidden to correspond with the members of his Diocese. ”

“ These "unredeemed" regions were generally called after their respective capital cities: Trent and Trieste. But, though the phrase Italia Irredenta was originally interpreted as referring only to the Trentino and Trieste, it has gradually assumed, in the course of years, a broader significance, until now it includes all that portion of the Tyrol lying south of the Brenner, the Carso plateau, Trieste and its immediate hinterland, the entire Istrian Peninsula, the Hungarian port of Fiume, and the whole of Dalmatia and Albania. ”

“ It should be noted, however, that there are still Italians who are not part of this kingdom. The county of Venetia, at the extreme northeast of Italy, was added to the kingdom in 1866 as the result of a war which will be told about more fully in the next chapter, but the territory around the city of Trent, called by the Italians Trentino, and the county of Istria at the head of the Adriatic Sea, containing the important seaports of Trieste, Fiume, and Pola, are inhabited almost entirely by people of Italian blood. ”

“ It forms, with the Trentino, what is called Italia Irredenta. Although the feeling of Italians for unredeemed Italy is not what their feeling was for Lombardy or Venetia, it is a mistake to imagine that they have renounced all aspirations in that direction. Only fanatics of the worst kind would be disposed to attempt, in the present situation, to win those provinces by force, but that has nothing to do with the matter. The aspiration exists and cannot help existing. It has always been shared by patriots of all denominations. ”

“ If you asked your neighbour at the dinner-table which of the glens of the dolomites 244 he had rambled into? he did not know there were any; if he had seen the Lares snow-fields flush at sunrise or swim in sunset haze? if he had stood on any crest or 'tower of observance' high enough to overlook the Trentino to where the peaks of Primiero and Cadore raise their ramparts against a golden sky?—he could only reply with a stare of dull incredulity.
But, once hardened to the contemplation of such misery in one's fellow-creatures, the state of the pension was not without its advantages. ”

“ It was in fact directed almost wholly against Austria, and was also used as a stalking-horse by discontented parties in Italian domestic politics—the Radicals, Republicans and Socialists. In addition to the overworked argument from language, the Irredentists made much of an unfounded claim that the Trentino had been conquered by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the war of 1866, and they insisted that the district was an “enclave” in Italian territory which would give Austria a dangerous advantage in a war of aggression. ”

“ In 1797 they obtained Venetia proper, in 1803 the secularized bishoprics of Trent and Brixen (as well as that of Salzburg, more to the north) , besides the Valtellina region, and in 1815 the Bergamasque valleys, while the Milanese had belonged to them since 1535. But, as is well known, in 1859 they lost to the house of Savoy both the Milanese and the Bergamasca, and in 1866 Venetia proper also, so that the Trentino is now their chief possession on the southern slope of the Alps. ”

“ Battisti always remained at the head of the movement for an Italian university at Trieste, strongly opposing the acceptance of any compromise that would establish this university elsewhere, even in Trentino. ”

“ For Cesare Battisti, as well as for the true Trentino people, these were very thrilling times. Battisti displayed in those days a tremendous activity, and in Rome his voice sounded, together with the voice of our greatest living poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio. The healthy conscience of the Italian people won; Italy resolutely preferred the way of Camillus, Caesar, Garibaldi — not the way urged by Prince Buelow. On the 24th of May, 1915, the bells of the Capitol belfry rang joyously for the victory Italy had achieved over herself. War was declared. ”

“ When Italy was plunged in grief at the time of the Messina earthquake, the Austrian General Staff almost persuaded their Government that the moment had come to strike her down into the dust, and recover Lombardy and Venetia for Francis Joseph and Rome for the Pope. And so to-day an Italian Army fighting on the Isonzo Front fights in continual danger of having its line of communications cut by an Austrian offensive from the Trentino.
The population of the Trentino is indisputably Italian. East of the Isonzo the people are mainly Italian in the towns and mainly Slovene in the country districts. ”