In 1916, Cesare Battisti, a member of the Socialist Group in the parliament of Vienna, was hanged in Trento for having deserted the Austrian Army and for having organized a fervent propaganda campaign in Italy in favor of military intervention against Austria-Hungary. One hundred years after his death, an international conference organized in Trento revisited questions and issues raised by Battisti's execution and focused on the identification practices of the populations of the Habsburg Empire within the state structure. Particular attention was focused on the changing and complex dynamics of loyalty from below and on the actions of the State to guarantee—or keep—its legitimacy during World War I. As Paolo Pombeni highlighted in the volume's preface, this analytical focus represents one of the most interesting subjects that the historiography on the late imperial Austria-Hungary has explored in recent years (16–25). The fact that these issues had found publication in Italian is an interesting exception within a national historiography not always original in this field. It is not surprising, therefore, that the initiative was led by the Italienisch-Deutsches Historisches Institute of Trento, for many years a bond between the Italian-speaking and German-speaking historiography.

The volume is composed of fourteen essays, very heterogeneous in quality and themes. The geographic scale of the investigation, which intends to summarize the experiences of many nationalities of the empire in a comparative perspective, prevents a deeper examination of important issues in some cases. Many of the essays are, indeed, excellent summaries on the state of research regarding individual linguistic areas, rather than original studies. This is the case of the chapters of Maurizio Cau (“La mobilitazione letteraria austriaca e la Grande Guerra”), Fulvio Cammarano (“Quale Occidente? 1914: le costituzioni in Guerra”), Marina Cattaruzza (“Aspirazioni nazionali e cultura asburgica. Trieste nel passaggio dall'Austria all'Italia”), Francesco Caccamo (“I cechi, la Prima Guerra mondiale e la dissoluzione dell'Impero asburgico”), Catherine Horel (“Il Compromesso austro-ungherese alla prova della Grande Guerra”), Egidio Ivetic (“Gli slavi meridionali 1914–1918”), and Guido Franzinetti (“I polacchi nella Prima guerra mondiale”).

Furthermore, in these chapters, attention is often focused on the development of political movements and parties: these are topics that are rather well known to scholars and do not represent news for the connoisseurs of the topics under study. Among these chapters, which are more like synthesis than original studies, there are nevertheless significant differences. While Horel and Cattaruzza write two brilliant analyses, based on updated historiography, other essays, while correctly framing the issues, cannot be described as innovative: the texts on the Czechs and the Yugoslavs show how in Italy the knowledge of the most recent literature on the identification and belonging mechanisms of these populations of the empire is unacquainted, to the point that some statements can be defined even outdated. In the quotations there is no record of the volumes of Pieter Judson, Rudolf Kučera, and Tara Zahra (for the Czech area, just for example), while the author who analyzes the Yugoslavs seems to ignore the presence of a recent, but qualified, Slovenian historiography on the subject (Rok Stergar, Petra Svoljšak, and Jernej Kosi). Franzinetti's essay on Poles in the empire is so brief and generic that it constitutes a marginal contribution to the volume.

Other chapters, conversely, are more interesting. Some represent original research cues, although spatially limited. The essay by Marco Bellabarba, for instance, analyzes the activity of the young Seton Watson, whose action during and after the war is well known to specialists. The chapters written by Fabrizio Rasera and Mirko Saltori are interesting in their focus on the activity of Battisti as a socialist politician and how it was a prevalent part of his education and political career. The essays of Oswald Überegger and Laurence Cole should also be included in this group of texts. Those who know the previous publications of the two authors will not fail to recognize in the two essays many of the theses that they have already expressed in other volumes. The two chapters, however, are interesting both for the focus—they deal with the Austro-Germans, who often remain on the fringes of the analysis on minorities—and for the quality of the research as there are plenty of references to archival sources.

Finally, the volume contains two essays that constitute original research and that, together with the last ones mentioned, stand out from the others. This is the text of Alessandro Livio (“L'atteggiamento della popolazione trentina durante la Grande Guerra nei documenti degli archivi austriaci”) and that of Emanuela Costantini (“I romeni di Transilvania tra lealtà dinastica e identità nazionale”). These two chapters are those that best integrate with the programmatic proposal that Pombeni has expressed in the preface. Moreover, both the essays make rigorous use of archival sources and are consistent with the most recent historiography on the theme of belonging patterns and loyalty in the Habsburg Empire.

In conclusion, the volume is a marked improvement on the Italian book market. For international scholars who usually deal with the most recent and high-quality literature on the Habsburg Empire, however, some of the chapters appear more like good literature reviews than actual original research. The interesting element of the book for international readers concerns those chapters that can add further pieces to the knowledge of the mosaic of experiences of the citizens of the empire facing the war challenges, for instance exploiting sources not yet explored (Livio, Costantini) or thematizing less studied aspects (radicalization of the Austro-Germans, Battisti as Socialist) of the Austro-Hungarian war experience.