The ‘Common Sense’ of the Italian Nation

Of course, when Molina first stepped into his new office that summer of 1923, he could not predict the course of the fascist Italianisation campaign; he had only his knowledge as an Italian nationalist and irredentist to structure his approach to the task at hand. As such, Molina shared the opinion of a sizeable contingent of Italians who, at the turn of the twentieth century, argued that the addition of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol (as well as the Julian March to the east) helped complete Italy's nineteenth-century unification movement, the Risorgimento.Footnote ¹² To make this assertion, irredentists like Molina relied on internationally recognised assumptions about nationality and national self-determination that entwined Italian entitlement to the territory and its people to the degree of their ‘Italian-ness’.Footnote ¹³ This equation was regularly employed (and manipulated) to justify territorial and political claims across Europe as nationalists sought to revise the map for a post-war reality.Footnote ¹⁴ At least in name, the mandate for states and their borders to determine clear boundaries between different national populations – to adhere to a so-called nationality principle – became a mainstay of twentieth-century state-building (and state-breaking) policy the world over.

At the same time, the intensity of these irredentists’ conviction regarding Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol's primordial italianità was matched only by the imprecision of what it meant to be ‘Italian’. Despite the confidence of nationalist activists – and many of the scholars who have studied them – ‘nations’ are hardly static entities, either as realities or as imagined communities.Footnote ¹⁵ Instead, as more recent scholars have argued, a ‘nation’ is more appropriately understood as a process, a collection of practices – collective and individual, public and private – that continuously makes, un-makes and remakes a supposedly cohesive and comprehensive whole.Footnote ¹⁶ Likewise and necessarily, any national categorisation is the product of perpetual negotiation between its (self- and state-) identified members and non-members, among participants and within state structures. In other words, the contours of italianità might have maintained a façade of stability but were (and are) in fact both nebulous and malleable. Nationalists understood the essence of italianità to be intuitive, identifiable to all; what it meant to be Italian was, in short, a matter of ‘common sense’. But this imprecision was not merely a convenient trait for idealistic nationalists; as Ann Laura Stoler has argued in the context of colonialist ideas of race in the Dutch East Indies, the vagueness in both generic and specific contexts of this or any national, racial or ethnic category was fundamental to its purpose. The lack of concrete, universal definitions of individual nationalities allowed for an important measure of mediation among and between power brokers and members of the communities in question that served to concentrate cultural capital within the state.Footnote ¹⁷ The supposed fixity and naturalness of italianità promoted the goals of national cohesion and clear boundaries between Italy and neighbouring states; the fluidity of its features simultaneously gave authorities of all sorts the flexibility to emphasise some and ignore others as they deemed appropriate.Footnote ¹⁸

The fact that Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol was and is a borderland means that these negotiations were particularly apparent – and relevant. The historically contingent nature of state boundaries means they are sites of political contestation and inherently impermanent; political boundaries are, as Peter Sahlins has written, ‘the point at which a state's territorial competence finds its ultimate expression’.Footnote ¹⁹ Border territories and communities therefore frequently become dynamic sites of political power and consequently agents of change in state definitions of citizenship, sovereignty and nationality.Footnote ²⁰ They are, in fact, places where multiple imaginings of the ‘nation’, ‘nationality’ and belonging overlap, sometimes harmoniously, many times not. The growing variety of case studies of nationalisation projects in twentieth-century European borderlands simultaneously illustrates the inability of a single theoretical model to explain the diversity of experiences and the importance of those experiences at the peripheries of a state to understanding the nature and limits of power at its centre.Footnote ²¹ Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol was no exception, and the vagueness surrounding the nature of its Italian character hints at a broader difficulty in defining the Italian nation.Footnote ²²

Still, Italian irredentists identified some broad regional traits that they argued clearly demarcated Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol as nationally and spiritually Italian. Like Alon Confino's nationalists in Württemberg, Germany, they frequently highlighted geographical and economic characteristics in service of this claim.Footnote ²³ What appeared to resonate most profoundly among nationalist accounts, however, was the territory's Italian-speaking population that, according to Austria-Hungary's own census data, they claimed, comprised between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of the regional population.Footnote ²⁴ It bears noting that this assertion was not as straightforward as it first appears. In his employment of the census data to promote Italian annexation, the outspoken irredentist and trentino Ettore Tolomei entirely ignored the responses from residents in Alto Adige/Südtirol.Footnote ²⁵ Opponents to Italian annexation of Alto Adige/Südtirol like Hans von Voltellini and Emil von Ottenthal, in contrast, emphasised the very limited number of Italian speakers in Alto Adige/Südtirol, noting that Ladin speakers were not Italian speakers, despite the fact that the census did not make that distinction.Footnote ²⁶ Very clearly, the idea that the addition of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol would reunite hundreds of thousands of Italians to their rightful fatherland was therefore predicated most often on the popular nationalist belief in a correlation between language and national belonging.Footnote ²⁷ Italian nationalists were certainly not alone in this assessment; language was often the first characteristic used to identify national membership among populations across Europe, most notably, but not exclusively, in the twentieth-century nation-building efforts in Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote ²⁸ By this logic, speakers of the Italian language were ‘Italian’ and speakers of the German language were ‘German’.

That reasoning appears straightforward enough but, like nationality more generally, this ‘common-sense’ relationship faced practical challenges. One difficulty that was especially prominent within Italy's borders at the turn of the twentieth century was the lack of a singular Italian language. In fact, by some linguistic measures, little more than 2 per cent of Italian citizens at the time of national unification spoke what nationalists would identify as Italian. This proportion roughly matched that of citizens whose primary language was considered ‘foreign’, such as French.Footnote ²⁹ The majority of Italy's citizens (and would-be citizens, such as the trentini) spoke a variety of what nationalists tended to dismiss as regional ‘dialects’ – mere offshoots of an official Italian language – which were nonetheless often entirely incomprehensible to one another.Footnote ³⁰

The fact that language was considered such an essential determinant of national categorisations was accompanied by the common assumption that an individual's self-identification had to adhere to a single national category. Even in the former multilingual Austro-Hungarian Empire, where a significant portion of the population necessarily spoke more than one language, the last imperial censuses made no allowance for respondents to indicate bilingualism, secondary languages or alternative forms of community as primary forms of identification; citizens were only ever defined by their primary language of use, such as, for example, Czech or Slovenian.Footnote ³¹ This inflexibility worked in tandem with the increasingly vocal demand from nationalists that state borders conform to national boundaries, such that identifying the linguistic categorisation of a community was often tantamount to determining political legitimacy within that community.

Unsurprisingly, then, Italian nationalists long insisted on the fundamentally ‘Italian’ identity of Italian-speaking trentini and found convenient explanations for the existence of two other major language groups in the region.Footnote ³² An historical storyline that traced the Trentine population's roots to ancient Rome was particularly powerful in confirming its italianità and the foreignness of Ladin and German speakers.Footnote ³³ Nineteenth-century irredentists had given the southern portion of the territory, where its Italian speakers predominantly resided, the name ‘Trentino’ as a tribute to the Latin name of its largest city, Tridentum (now known as Trent).Footnote ³⁴ Accordingly, Tolomei, who considered himself an expert on Trentine history, declared the city ‘wholly Italian in speech and aspect’, and a bastion of italianità that had for centuries protected the peninsula against a northern tide of ‘German-ness’ and ‘Germanisation’.Footnote ³⁵ As Molina himself described it:

More significant than remaining true to their ‘Italian’ spirit in the face of Germanic oppression, Molina asserted, was the fact that the trentini had ‘always’ been on ‘the front lines’ in the fight to ‘return’ the region to Italy.Footnote ³⁷ He deemed no ‘evidence’ more salient than the willingness of ‘the hundreds, the thousands’ of trentini lit ‘by an inextinguishable flame of faith’, to fight voluntarily for Italy in the First World War. When Italy joined the war in 1915, Molina wrote in one 1930 article, able-bodied trentini abandoned their financial and material interests to fight for Italy rather than for their Germanic oppressors.Footnote ³⁸ Their selfless patriotism was made all the more heroic in light of the treatment the Habsburg government visited upon its Italian speakers during the war.Footnote ³⁹ In a 1917 letter to the Vatican, the bishop of Trent described the cruel treatment his Italian-speaking parishioners suffered at the hands of their own government: trentini interned or imprisoned (as was the bishop himself), churches and holy sites profaned and private property damaged or confiscated.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even so, Molina later proclaimed, trentini diligently fought to conserve their italianità for no other reason than the dream of one day seeing recompense from their rightful fatherland.Footnote ⁴¹

When Italy finally did annex Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol in the aftermath of the First World War – with the ‘movement of borders over people’ as opposed to the movement of people over borders – Rome honoured this facile narrative by naming the region Venezia Tridentina.Footnote ⁴² The general in charge of the post-war military occupation, Guglielmo Pecori Giraldi, insisted on deploying Trentine veterans of the Italian military to administrative positions throughout the newly acquired territory, arguing that trentini were of critical importance to establishing a new government.Footnote ⁴³ Luigi Credaro, Italy's first civilian administrator of the region, declared Italy's successful appropriation of Venezia Tridentina as a victory for the trentini and a recognition of their many sacrifices on behalf of their Italian nation.Footnote ⁴⁴ And the administration of all public services was subsequently centralised in Trent, which meant closing or transferring many offices that were previously maintained in the predominantly German-speaking city of Bozen/Bolzano.Footnote ⁴⁵ These decisions deliberately linked the whole territory to Trent and the trentini while avoiding recognition of its German- and Ladin-speaking residents.Footnote ⁴⁶ The result was to suggest an inherent, objective italianità throughout the entire region and population through the legendary national loyalty of the trentini; such a characterisation was essential to ensure fidelity to the spirit of national self-determination – that is, that the territory was ‘Italian’ and therefore wanted to be part of the Italian state – for the sake of outside observers and Italian nationalists alike.

At the same time, Italian administrators faced the practical question of what to do with their new, non-Italian-speaking citizens.Footnote ⁴⁷ Despite the diplomatic confirmation of Italian control and the supposed permanence of the new borders on the ground, the presence of ‘foreigners’ – frequently termed alloglotti or allogeni – in the new borderland suggested an indeterminacy to Italy's national and therefore political sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁸ Molina later recalled his supervisor in Rome, Leonardo Severi, remarking in 1923 that ‘the presence of a population – perhaps a race – that was unquestionably German-speaking in the so-called Alto Adige presented the Italian state with problems that were delicate and without easy solutions’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Italian statesmen in Rome determined that a clearly defined and visible border of italianità was essential to marking the new boundaries of their state power.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Maura Hametz has described in regard to the Julian March (Venezia Giulia), this distinct boundary of italianità was meant to act as a ‘bulwark’ against any potential aggression from the Germanic lands to the north.Footnote ⁵¹ Especially in comparison to the Julian March, where Italian officials identified ‘Slovenes’ and ‘Croatians’ as additional challenges to Italianisation, it was probably fairly easy for the officials in Rome who had never travelled to the Alpine territory to believe in the relative ease with which the region could be ‘saturated’ with italianità and, by extension, unquestioned Italian political and cultural sovereignty.Footnote ⁵²

Gradual Assimilation to the Nation

The pressure to create a fortification of italianità against the threat of Germanism took on a greater sense of urgency after Benito Mussolini settled into his role as Duce of the new fascist state in late 1922.Footnote ⁵³ His regime believed that integrating German- and Ladin-speaking residents of southern Tyrol into Italian life – Italianising them – was critical to asserting Italy's national, historical right to the former Austro-Hungarian territory.Footnote ⁵⁴ Reminding the Ministry of Education of this ambition in 1924 when requesting additional funds to build nursery schools, Molina's office wrote that ‘it is necessary that the German zones in Alto Adige are assimilated to the Italian culture, language and religious customs as quickly as possible, just as it is necessary for Italy to clearly demonstrate its power in all aspects of life to this people.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Unstated, but just as important, was the necessity for assimilation to come under the leadership of Mussolini and the Fascist Party as evidence of their capable command of a truly unified Italian nation-state. The regime consequently undertook a multifaceted and increasingly inflexible project to erase signs of German-ness and emphasise italianità throughout Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, just as it did in the Julian March. But this campaign largely left unaddressed what benchmarks it would use to assess success; the wholesale adoption of the official Italian language was an obvious component, but all other standards appeared to be open to interpretation.

For the newly appointed superintendent of schools, this under-defined project required a translation of ever-changing fascist policies into a comprehensive curriculum that conveyed the essence of italianità to Venezia Tridentina's children.Footnote ⁵⁶ It also depended on selecting teachers who were skilled in creating bonds with their students and who themselves embodied the lessons they needed to impart, particularly for preschool and primary students. Molina wrote in the introductory letter to his bimonthly bulletin that ‘he who takes on the arduous task of guiding the first years of the child to the conquest, or rather to the revelation, of the spirit, he who watches with anxious joy at this ever-renewing miracle must truly be fully and profoundly aware of the spiritual value of his work’ and its connection to every other aspect of life.Footnote ⁵⁷ This stance reflected contemporary European pedagogical thinking, particularly as it was articulated by Giovanni Gentile, the first Fascist Minister of Education; Molina simply needed to discern who would best be able to take on that ‘arduous task’ in a territory defined by shifting borders, multiple languages and deep communal loyalty to the authority of the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁵⁸

It was here where the vagueness of Rome's language about italianità and Italianisation in the first years of the fascist regime served Molina and his colleagues in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol well. In his memoir, Molina claimed to have quickly recognised the need to implement pedagogical and administrative solutions adaptable ‘to the specifics of the problems to be solved’ in the territory.Footnote ⁵⁹ Presuming all parts of the administration agreed on the fundamental goals of Italianisation, as well as on the principal elements of italianità, Molina believed it was in everyone's best interest that local officials have the freedom to assess and implement the most appropriate means to achieve the common ends. In other words, local administrators and teachers needed enough autonomy to respond to the needs of their communities without overbearing interference from officials sitting in faraway offices.Footnote ⁶⁰ The imprecision that accompanied the supposedly obvious nature of italianità – the heart of Rome's Italianisation policies – gave Molina and his colleagues the space to do just that. For his first few years in Trent, Molina relied on his own ‘common-sense’ understandings of Italian-ness and the challenges of state-building in a borderland to interpret policy without presenting clear inconsistencies with the regime's expectations – in this case, using trentini as the backbone of his Italianisation efforts. The physical and interpretive distance between the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ granted local bureaucrats the independence to navigate local particularities while concurrently (at least in some cases) establishing a veneer of hegemonic control from the centre. Of course, the revelation of just how far those distances were, and Molina's subsequent moral outrage over the tensions they produced, indicate not just the limits of this decentralised structure in an increasingly authoritarian regime, but also the extent to which the theoretical foundation of Italianisation was neither common nor sensical.

But for a few years at least, the interpretive space generated by a reliance on ‘common-sense’ assumptions about Italianisation allowed regional officials in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol to sidestep otherwise-national regulations and retain or hire greater numbers of bilingual teachers to serve in predominantly German-speaking communities.Footnote ⁶¹ The president of the Trentine nationalist organation Legione trentina, Giuseppe Cristofolini, publicly argued that it was essential for Venezia Tridentina's schools to employ teachers who already knew German so that these important representatives of the Italian nation-state could more easily communicate and connect with the region's allogeni.Footnote ⁶² These connections, so the thinking went, would ease the transition into Italian life for many German- and Ladin-speaking children and prove to their families they had nothing to fear from the new administration. As further support for this process of ‘gradual assimilation’, Molina observed that, while many teachers from other parts of Italy often aroused suspicion among residents, a vital form of ‘Italianising osmosis’ took place when Italian and German speakers were allowed to coexist and learn from one another on their own terms.Footnote ⁶³ The superintendent therefore supported putting ‘the two national groups in as much contact as possible, to encourage them to take part in the same life, to create a community as close as possible to long-term benefit and aspirations’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Trentini had lifetimes of entanglement with their German- and Ladin-speaking neighbours that, Molina contended, engendered greater trust between teachers and students and, in turn, exposed German and Ladin speakers rather effortlessly to the Italian language.

Additionally, as long-considered models of italianità, Molina believed trentini brought much more than the Italian language to the territory's alloglotti; they modelled the superior Italian character through their behaviour and, under Molina's leadership, their innovative pedagogical training. He wrote of Trentine teachers as exemplifying italianità in that they were ‘accustomed to serious work; tenacious; ready to accept hardships and inconveniences; unconcerned about the dangers they sometimes faced, as they were enlightened by a faith of the purest form’.Footnote ⁶⁵ More to the point, the superintendent argued, the warm and generous ‘Italian’ teacher quickly proved herself a welcome contrast to the rigid and closed attitudes of her ‘German’ counterpart.Footnote ⁶⁶ Tolomei likewise wrote that Trentine teachers were the ‘best means with which italianità could penetrate the highest valleys of the region’ because they personified a ‘conscientious, willing, effective, and fitting spirit, combining kindness with firmness’.Footnote ⁶⁷ What is most apparent in these assessments is the un-objective use of affective characteristics to describe the supposedly impartial concept of Trentine italianità (and Tyrolean German-ness). No part of nationality is particularly definitive (outside of legal citizenship), but the very clear privileging of ‘moral virtues’ in determining (and denying) Trentine italianità emphasised the instability of the category.Footnote ⁶⁸ It also suggested that the same vague language that gave Molina leeway to interpret Rome's demands as he deemed appropriate also provided ample room for misunderstanding between administrators in Trent and Rome; this tension would become ever less tolerable as Rome moved to expand and centralise its control over Italian life after the resolution of the Matteotti Crisis in 1925.

With his rosy memory of his first ‘ten years of happy accomplishments’, Molina maintained that ‘rare were the weaknesses and faults’ of those first cohorts of teachers, and he seldom had to discipline them.Footnote ⁶⁹ Even if he conceded that ‘Italian’ teachers in predominantly German- and Ladin-speaking territories frequently faced initial opposition from residents, he was quick to add that ‘the suspicion and hostility of the early years were followed by moderate goodwill and finally friendly trust’ between teachers and the communities in which they worked.Footnote ⁷⁰ In a final assessment, Molina concluded that his system of gradual assimilation, in which the Trentine population was instrumental, was quite successful among the so-called non-native populations of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol.Footnote ⁷¹ By the mid-1920s, he reported with a semi-colonialist air that the Tyrolean children had started to smooth their ‘naturally rough edges’. He asserted, ‘the Italian teacher conquered her children with the virtue of her spirit, the humanity of her manner, and the responsiveness of her character.’Footnote ⁷² Echoing this sentiment in a 1925 article, the Tuscan journalist and children's author Italiano Marchetti described the schools of Venezia Tridentina as the ‘most Italian schools’, ‘wisely ordered, the smallest detail curated with loving exactitude, throbbing with life and enthusiasm’.Footnote ⁷³ After less than two years of experience at the helm, Molina was confident that he was making good headway in gradually assimilating the kingdom's new residents to the national community, and that he had the support of the fascist administration to prove it.

Measuring the Distance between Trent and Rome

This apparent idyll was not the full story, of course, and Molina's recollections of Rome's policy shifts between 1926 and 1934 suggest some of the additional considerations at play, illuminating both the instability of fascist definitions of italianità and the arbitrary qualifications used to determine its membership. The superintendent devoted particular attention to two executive decisions that confirmed an increasingly untenable gap between how officials in the ‘centre’ and at the ‘periphery’ believed the Italian state could best ensure the italianità of the new borderland. First was the late 1926 administrative division of a unified region of Venezia Tridentina into two provinces, Trentino (in the south) and Alto Adige (in the north), which concentrated state funds and attention in the northern portion of the territory, away from Trentino and its population. Second, and more damaging in Molina's eyes, came the 1934 announcement that virtually all trentini would be removed from their positions within the schools of Alto Adige/Südtirol and replaced with teachers and administrators from Italy's ‘old’ provinces – that is, those provinces that had been part of the kingdom since its nineteenth-century unification. According to Molina, the forced transfer of the vast majority of Trentine teachers essentially transformed what he considered to be models of italianità into potential enemies of a clearly defined Italian populace in the borderland.Footnote ⁷⁴

That the benchmarks by which Italianisation would be measured remained overwhelmingly abstract allowed the state's various actors to read the same data in dramatically divergent ways. Molina reported that the mid-1920s contained evidence of growing trust between students, teachers and families, and of declining tensions between school officials and Church leadership; italianità, principally in the form of Italian language usage, was slowly but surely infiltrating the lives of German- and Ladin-speaking children and their families. But where Molina saw steady progress toward Italianisation, Mussolini and administrators in Rome's Ministry of Education seem increasingly to have read local ambivalence, indifference and even antagonism towards Italian authority. A regime that sought ever-growing uniformity of the Italian character and experience decoded information regarding Tyroleans’ limited embrace of italianità as proof of the ineffectiveness of gradual assimilation. Any resistance to swift and complete Italianisation, real or imagined, was considered verification of continued danger to the nation-state along its northernmost border.Footnote ⁷⁵ In a brief interview with a journalist from the French newspaper Le Petit Parisien that covered a number of issues regarding Italy's foreign relations, Mussolini conceded concern for the continued menace of pan-Germanism in Venezia Tridentina and vowed to make the territory ‘Italian’.Footnote ⁷⁶ This reaction to the continued presence of German and Ladin speakers in the region was not unexpected; that the regime would then pursue policies effectively holding the trentini responsible for such ‘inadequate’ progress outraged many Italian speakers in the borderland.Footnote ⁷⁷

In December 1926, the administration announced its decision to divide Venezia Tridentina into two politically distinct provinces, largely along linguistic fault lines.Footnote ⁷⁸ At first glance, this declaration had nothing to do with Italianisation, the trentini or gradual assimilation, as it was part of a kingdom-wide administrative reform of the provincial system. Yet the shift marked a rather significant change in the regime's approach to the assimilation project, particularly considering the substantial overlap between the new administrative borders and what officials viewed as ethno-linguistic boundaries. The northern portion of the territory, Alto Adige/Südtirol, would no longer answer to officials in Trent. Instead, it would have its own line of communication with Rome through prefectural offices in Bozen/Bolzano, at the centre of the German-speaking population.Footnote ⁷⁹ The increasingly centralised fascist state appeared to envision the partition as a means to aggregate and control the majority of the territory's German speakers, with the notable repercussion of limiting Molina's bureaucratic freedom to lean heavily on trentini to serve in Alto Adige/Südtirol's schools, even though the Ministry of Education would maintain a unified administration for the two provinces until 1936. These governmental changes would, in theory, protect Trentino's Italian speakers from further risk of Germanisation and allow the regime more directly to oversee the Italianisation of those residents who most threatened Italian state power along the northern border.Footnote ⁸⁰ At the same time, Italianisation would no longer take place primarily through a process of cohabitation and appropriation, relying on the entangled lives of German, Italian and Ladin speakers, and local italianità, to see its successful completion.

Molina interpreted the administrative division of Venezia Tridentina as an initial step in Rome's decision – made ‘with an indefinable imprudence’ – to ‘make Bolzano, a city by now Germanised to its roots, the vanguard of italianità, the bulwark of our national defence’.Footnote ⁸¹ The superintendent described how, to do so, party officials ‘proposed introducing new elements from the array of Italian provinces, sending them up there as officials, clerks, laborers and peasants, trying little by little to overwhelm the non-native peoples with an ever-increasing national demographic’.Footnote ⁸² In other words, migrants from supposedly more authentic Italian provinces were expected to outnumber and ultimately replace the German- and Ladin-speaking residents of Alto Adige/Südtirol.Footnote ⁸³

Population transfers as a tactic of ‘ethnic simplification’ were not particularly new to interwar European nationalisation projects, nor to the fascist regime and its attempts to Italianise the margins of its empire-nation.Footnote ⁸⁴ In fact, fascists had encouraged the emigration of Italians from ‘older’ regions to Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from the very beginning of their administration.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, in Mussolini's 1926 interview with Le Petit Parisien, the core of his plan of action had been the settlement by ‘bona fide’ Italians, which, according to the Duce, had already begun: ‘On the Austrian frontier I have introduced a zone of 30 kilometres, which allows only people we authorise to settle.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Mussolini called for a border wall of italianità, but not one whose foundation was the local, ‘innate’, ‘immutable’ italianità that had been so essential to justifying annexation in 1919; instead, he would import italianità to the kingdom's new frontier. And, from 1927 on, this plan was pursued in earnest. The regime encouraged a steady influx of Italians who were not just seasonal workers, but manufacturers, artisans and entrepreneurs, with the idea that they would bring economic growth to the northern borderland and, in turn, encourage other Italians to emigrate. Party leaders in Rome believed this scheme would infuse the local population with the ‘vital energies’ of more established, more authentic, Italians.Footnote ⁸⁷ Bozen/Bolzano would hold the line of italianità against the further invasion of Italy's Germanic enemies.

Other historians have explored the measures Mussolini subsequently dictated with the intent of converting the province of Bozen/Bolzano into a ‘province of the future’, most notably through the construction of a new industrial sector in which virtually no German speakers were permitted to work; scholars have given far less attention to the fact that many of the resources devoted to this new facet of the Italianisation project were taken directly away from the Trentino and its residents.Footnote ⁸⁸ If, as Mabel Berezin has argued, national loyalty is a product of state efforts and practices, Rome did not appear particularly interested in employing its assets to inspire greater patriotism among the trentini.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a reversal of the administrative relocations undertaken in 1919 and 1920, government and military offices, as well as jobs, were transferred from Trent to Bozen/Bolzano at the end of the 1920s, much to the unhappiness of Trentine officials and civilians.Footnote ⁹⁰ Some Trentine authorities even complained to their superiors in Rome.Footnote ⁹¹ In fact, it was the local Fascist Party leader in Trent, Giuseppe Brasavola de Massa, who reported to headquarters in 1929 that ‘the situation, as Your Excellency can see, is critical but not irreversible, as with a not excessive expense it could restore to the province that well-being and peace that its traditions of patriotism and the hardworking, serene discipline of its populations deserve.’Footnote ⁹² In his memoir, Molina was more direct: Trent ‘was neglected and offended’.Footnote ⁹³ Although perhaps unanticipated, an important consequence of the 1926 provincial division was the economic and cultural segregation of the trentini, breeding significant resentment towards the fascist state and, rather ironically, further threatening the supposedly fragile hold on their italianità.Footnote ⁹⁴

Molina was baffled by Rome's disruptive actions, lamenting that they had to be the result of ‘a strange and obstinate antipathy toward the trentini’ in Rome, ‘born of I-don't-know-what reasons’. He continued, writing that ‘many thought, with obvious injustice, that the former Austrian domination had deformed the nature of the population, so that it was not considered prudent to rely on its italianità for any work of greater political importance’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Molina might have been able to rationalise the ‘frostiness’ he occasionally experienced from some trentini as understandable wariness and local character, but others registered it as outright resistance to the rightful expansion of Italian power.Footnote ⁹⁶ The superintendent was not alone in this evaluation. Cristofolini also condemned the criticisms of the trentini that ‘raged in the aftermath of the establishment of the new border province’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The prominent Italian nationalist was particularly incensed by mounting accusations of widespread ‘Trentinism’ (trentinismo) in the region, countering that they were ‘absurd, derived from ignorance and, in some cases, a shallow sense of competition, which insinuates accusations to undermine those in enviable positions and used by some officials as excuses for their own deficiencies’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although italianità was still prevalent in discussions of Trentine identity (both in and outside Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol), growing reference to Trentinism as an equally oblique – but considerably more freighted – term of collective chauvinism suggests a noteworthy shift in thinking about the character of trentini in recognition of their relative ‘degree of foreignness’ next to Italians from the ‘old’ provinces.Footnote ⁹⁹

Indeed, the concept of Trentinism and the open debate over its meaning encapsulate much of the ambivalence that fascist authorities expressed towards the trentini, not to mention the un-‘common sense’ of such terms. As opposed to the idealised spirit of italianità that nationalists imagined all ‘Italians’ shared, by the late 1920s increased allegations of Trentinism maintained local characteristics were ‘symptoms of recalcitrance toward connecting with their fellow countrymen’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Echoing the ways in which Molina referred to affective traits as indicators of Trentine italianità, one local party official described trentini – who, he remarked, were ‘all more or less Trentinists, the rest are anti-Trentinists’ – as ‘a mountain people: by nature closed and hateful of everything that may appear artificial hype, very sensitive and suspicious’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This blatant generalisation was indicative of the broader trend in public discussions of Trentinism to identify local habits and behaviours that purportedly revealed an incompatibility between trentini and italianità. But that is largely where agreement over the term ended. In fact, that same local party official, Dante Tuninetti, decided in 1928 to dedicate an entire volume to the variety of interpretations of Trentinism and anti-Trentinism. Tuninetti introduced the volume with his own definition, explaining that Trentinism was ‘that localised spirit derived from a small-minded and narrow background that informs the action – and even more the thoughts, opinions, and intentions – of a part of the Trentine people’.Footnote ¹⁰² Giving a bit more specificity to this regionalism, Tuninetti argued that Trentinists believed that ‘barbarians’ lived in Alto Adige, or at least ‘those undesirable foreigners who do not understand anything other than their immediate gain’ and who often ventured into Trentino ‘to satiate themselves and plunder like vulgar pirates’.Footnote ¹⁰³ According to this definition, anyone who supported Trentinism only stoked underlying tensions between Italian and German speakers in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol.

In contrast, other contributors to Tuninetti's volume argued that Trentinism led trentini to have greater affinity for their German-speaking neighbours, thereby increasing the risk of ‘Germanic’ sympathies and, correlatively, the potential for anti-Italian and anti-fascist sentiments. Molina later weighed in on this confusion:

In short, Trentinists were innately Italian but also provincial; part of the Italian nation but working against national interests. And, just to confirm the fact that Tuninetti's volume did little to clarify the relationship between Trentinism and italianità, the editor made the point of assuring his readers in the opening pages that ‘we’ – presumably the fascist state – ‘believe the Trentine population to be naturally and intimately Italian in its traditions, blood, culture, and spirit’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The state's questioning of Trentine italianità – either its legitimacy or its durability – was made even more apparent with the regime's growing limitations on the regional employment of trentini. Already in 1923 some of the most ardent Trentine nationalists had expressed frustration over a perceived lack of recognition for their contributions to the national cause. They claimed many who had fought valiantly for unification with Italy were being dismissed from positions within the civil government, only to be replaced by others whose history of loyalty to Italy was far less evident.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In a letter to Mussolini meant to explain away these complaints, the prefect of Venezia Tridentina at the time reported that only six Trentine civil servants had been transferred to positions in the ‘old’ provinces and the vast majority of the provincial functionaries remained trentini, working peacefully side-by-side with the few officials who had come from elsewhere in the kingdom. He also reassured Mussolini that no one wanted to ‘devalue the merits of the good and the best [trentini]; no one ignores the patriotism reflected in many of them that is held in the highest regard’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

By the end of the 1920s, however, many civil authorities and party officials, and even some local teachers, were much less concerned with mitigating Trentine resentment. In an article outlining the difficulties of successful assimilation in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, one teacher explained that all remaining teachers who spoke German needed to be dismissed because, even if they were pedagogically well trained, they ‘speak Italian like they speak German’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Just as was seen in the wider conversation about the compatibility of trentini and italianità, the author claimed trentini were less well suited to instil italianità in German-speaking students because German was part of their culture.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This commentary suggested that, despite the government's wartime praise for the great national feeling of the trentini and the famed resilience of their italianità under Habsburg rule, state representatives publicly intimated that Trentine familiarity with the German language and ‘Germanic’ customs was proof of a compromised Italian spirit. Tolomei added to this perception when he expressed the administration's concern that their familiarity with German might lead Trentine teachers to rely on that language for easier communication, which would only be damaging to the Italianisation project.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Interacting with German and Ladin speakers on a daily basis – something Molina had claimed was fundamental to their superior ability to connect with their German-language students – appeared to highlight the precariousness of Trentine italianità. Not only that, but the regime also needed to make sure that these Italian speakers did not defect in the face of ‘German propaganda’, which many officials at the time, including Molina, believed was crossing the border in a steady stream from the north.Footnote ¹¹¹ In short, the concern became whether the trentini were (or ever could be) Italian enough.Footnote ¹¹²

The mere concept of the trentini – the ambiguity of their national identity and therefore of their allegiance – appeared to threaten the inviolability of the Italian border and the supposed objectivity of Italy's national classifications. As such, officials in Rome began in earnest to transfer state-employed trentini to the ‘old’ provinces as a way to integrate them ‘more thoroughly into Italian life, to cure them of their provincial and narrow-minded provincialism that had crystallised in the exhausting and constant defence against prolonged foreign domination’.Footnote ¹¹³ Many German-speaking teachers had already been transferred or dismissed over the previous four years but, by 1927, Molina's office no longer accepted any applications for appointments within Alto Adige/Südtirol from teachers who spoke German.

The meaning of such rejections was most evident when they directly confronted other educational priorities of the state. For example, for years the Ministry of Education had lamented the limited number of male elementary teachers because they were deemed essential to the effective education of Italy's male students in critical subjects, such as virility and aggression.Footnote ¹¹⁴ And yet, most elementary teachers throughout the kingdom and throughout the ventennio remained female. It is remarkable, then, that when the administration experienced an uptick in requests from male trentini to teach in Alto Adige/Südtirol in the early 1930s, the prefect of Bozen/Bolzano wrote to Mussolini that ‘this does not excite me at all because there are already too many trentini in the province of Bolzano, and it is well known that, with some exceptions, they are not always the best messengers of pure italianità and a spirit of understanding toward the allogeni.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ Instead, he urged the Minister of Education to solicit or transfer teachers from the ‘old’ provinces in north and central Italy to Alto Adige/Südtirol, rather gratuitously reminding him that ‘knowledge of the German language is not necessary’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The prefect believed the influx of ‘purer’ Italians would help reduce the Trentinism that was present in the schools as he asserted that the majority of school teachers, principals and inspectors in Alto Adige/Südtirol were from Trentino.Footnote ¹¹⁷ His rejection of Trentine applicants does not mean these teachers were not sent to other parts of the kingdom to support the national education campaign, but it does indicate the relative order of state priorities in the Italian borderland.

Such recruitment efforts had already begun to expand in the summer of 1927, shortly after the decision to transform Venezia Tridentina into Trentino-Alto Adige and Molina stopped accepting applications from anyone who spoke German, but it was not until 1934 that Rome formally completed the shift away from entrusting any of the Italianisation campaign to Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol's Italian speakers. That year, the Ministry of Education announced that any remaining Trentine teachers in Alto Adige/Südtirol were to be relocated to school districts in central and southern Italy and replaced with ‘compatriots’ born far from the Dolomites. Later that year, an article in Tolomei's Archivio per l'Alto Adige declared that most elementary schools in Alto Adige/Südtirol were now headed by teachers from the ‘internal’ provinces of Italy.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The Limits of ‘Common Sense’

Shortly after the announcement in the summer of 1934 that Trentine teachers would be transferred to southern provinces, Molina publicly resigned from his position as superintendent of schools in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol (although it bears noting that he had received information the ministry was about to replace him). The fact that a long-serving and not-reluctant fascist official (one who had met several times with Mussolini himself) was willing openly to express his disagreement with the regime points to the complexity of fascist support within the ranks of the regime's bureaucrats. That he was then able to return two years later as the superintendent of schools in Trentino without discarding any of his resentment (at least according to Molina) also hints at some of the many compromises brokered between the regime, the state and the individuals who ultimately defined them.

Certainly the fascist Italianisation policies in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol were not novel either to Italian borderlands or twentieth-century European borderlands more generally. In fact, Roman bureaucrats were not shy about pointing out the implementation of similar language and education policies in the borderlands of non-fascist states.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Still, Rome's fluctuating rhetoric about and treatment of the resident Italian-speaking population between 1923 and 1934 highlighted a growing fissure between the central state's ‘common sense’ about italianità – based on a combination of abstract theories of nationality and immediate political necessity – and the complex realities of collective identifications and statecraft in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. Perhaps, more accurately, where Rome's imaginings of italianità were not compatible with those of residents in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, a type of hierarchy of Italian-ness emerged that clearly reflected the fluid process of nation-building.Footnote ¹²⁰ As the regime's desire to stabilise Italian control in the territory became more urgent, however, its efforts undermined the ability of local officials like Molina to delineate the parameters of italianità (or at least Italian control) in a region rich with its own cultural and political allegiances that by turns competed and overlapped with the interests of the Italian state. At the same time, Italy's struggles to implement more rigid criteria for Italianisation meant the weakening of officials’ moral authority, political support and ‘totalitarian’ façade in the region and, as a result, the inevitable failure of any sort of campaign to establish political or cultural hegemony in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. In other words, by attempting to assert more control over the definition of italianità and over the Italianisation process, Mussolini's Rome helped illuminate a fundamental, if ironic, reality that to have any possibility of success in establishing and defending ‘national’ borders anywhere, states need to rely heavily on both an adaptable understanding of nationality and their street-level bureaucrats to interpret it.