Cesare Battisti and the Trentino
The Italian Law School, however, was not reopened, either at Innsbruck or elsewhere; thus the mean arrogance of a low populace sufficed to deprive the Italians of the very small and only concession made them by the Austrian Government.
The agitation, however, for an Italian university at Trieste not only continued, but because of the wrong suffered, grew in intensity to such a degree as to become a national Italian question, not merely a question of irredentism. The Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Signor Tittoni, made it the base of negotiations with his colleague. Baron Aerenthal, Minister of Austro-Hungarian Foreign Affairs, at the time of the Bosnian crisis in 1908, but without result.
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.
Another very important question pertaining to Trentino, and one in which Battisti took a prominent part, was the question of her administration, which Trentino wanted to have separated from that of the whole province of Tyrol; the so-called question of "administrative autonomy" of Trentino.
It is well known that Trentino was always wholly and exclusively Latin, and later Italian. At the time of the Romans it was the tenth regio italica; under the Lombards it was an independent duchy, and had an analogous constitution under the Carolingians. In 1027 it was made an independent principality, under the Bishop of Trento, which it remained until the abolition of ecclesiastical states in 1803. It is true that the political "independence" of the principality was very relative; the counts of Tyrol, formally its vassals, in reality soon became the political rulers under the guise of "ecclesiastical advocates," but, so far as its administration was concerned, the state could in reality call itself autonomous.
When Trentino passed into the hands of Austria in 1813,
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