After Italian national unification, sporting associations became a great propaganda system for the patriotic ideas in Trentino, a region on the Italian-Austrian border. Until 1919, Trentino was included in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the southern area of the province of Tirol. This is the theme and thesis of Elena Tonezzer's book, which analyzes the activities and the national-pedagogic influences of the Italian sporting associations in Trentino from Italian national unification until World War I. In this era of nationalist competition, the principal political subcultures of the region—liberal, Socialist, and Catholic—operated through these associations. In fact, sporting competition was a venue to showcase Italian patriotic ideas and to counter the propaganda of similar German associations. Through various sporting and cultural associations, a closed circle of elites of different political orientations established themselves, and according to Tonezzer's research, held multiple and overlapping offices.

Today there is important historiographical work being done on the international level on the role of sports in the formation of national identities during nation-building in Europe. These studies have underlined the different meanings assigned to sports and have traced developments of sporting associations in various countries. These the author describes in the first chapter of the book. In Trentino, the German Turnen were an influential model; these were the associations founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in Berlin during the Napoleonic Wars. Through physical training, they raised and exalted the political and military attitudes of the young men. In the Italian-Austro border region, these sporting associations were sites of political and social advancement; they provided members with opportunities for social recognition that could not come from the family.

Free time in Trentino in the second half of the nineteenth century took on both social and national valences. The most popular sports were alpinism and other mountaineering activities such as climbing or rambling. Gymnastics in this period was, not by accident, introduced by imperial order as a compulsory subject in school. Cycling became a sports metaphor for modernity and a new route to social emancipation, especially in the last decade of the nineteenth century, thanks to the possibility of rapid mobility for rural and urban workers. Finally, target shooting was also popular. While women appeared at formal celebrations of sport, the author affirms that women's participation in the sporting events themselves, and consequently women's possibility for social emancipation and political activity, were very rare. We are therefore looking at a male community.

Alpinism and other mountain sports were particularly important in this region. The Alps represented a central cultural space in Trentino in which different national associations battled for control of the territory. In fact, the statute of the Italian alpinist association of Trentino, the Società Alpinisti Tridentini (SAT), founded in 1871, referenced not only sporting but also scientific, cultural, and definitely political aims. This book shows that after the union of Trentino with the Italian state following World War I, all sporting associations lost their roles as agents of national politicization. This now became a more institutionalized function of the military and the royal governments.

Elena Tonezzer's book reaffirms a traditional image of Trentino society in the nineteenth century, a society battling over questions of national identity. Except for the sections dedicated to the analyses of Catholic national politics and sporting associations, what definitely emerges from the book is a society more disposed to exalt in its Italian-ness. Maybe it would be interesting to compare the activities of Austrians and Germans in the Alpine region of Trentino. This might offer a more complete representation of the reaction of the local society to national competition during this period of nation-building in Europe.