Page:Cesare Battisti and the Trentino.djvu/45



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.

About 200 B. C. this region was occupied by the Romans, and the greater part, including the Trentino and the Bolzano District in the Upper Adige, formed under Augustus and his successors the tenth Italian region, together with the Venezia and Istria. In the Middle Ages the Trentino was practically governed by Bishops, who therefore, bore the title of Princes. Since the XII Century, however, it was, as far as the foreign relations were concerned, under the political control of the Counts of Tyrol, who later became the Emperors of Austria.

In 1803 the Princedom of the Bishops was abolished and the Trentino continually changed hands during the turbulent Napoleonic Era, until in 1810, it was annexed by Napoleon to the under the name of. This régime, of which the population still bears grateful memories, lasted too short a time, because in 1818 Austria again took possession of the Trentino and annexed it, in 1818, to the Germanic Confederation. This prevented the Trentino from obtaining its freedom when Lombardy and Veneto were freed in 1859, 1866.

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 Page Forty-three