As founder of the Christian Democrats and Italy's prime minister from 1945–1953, Alcide De Gasperi is one of the most important Italian politicians of the twentieth century. This was, however, only the last phase in a political career spanning more than five decades. Born in Trentino or Welschtirol in 1881, De Gasperi entered politics as a Habsburg subject, and Paolo Pombeni's biography is an analysis of De Gasperi's political development and career from his awakening to political Catholicism in the late 1890s to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the Italian annexation of Trentino.

Pombeni presents De Gasperi as a “professional politician” whose political formation was conditioned by three factors: the development of a political Catholicism, the “proto-constitutional” political framework of the late Habsburg Empire, and Trentino's status as a border region since 1866. It is of course this third factor that gives the subject its distinctive coloring as the Italian-speaking Trentini were a minority within the crownland of Tirol whereas their homeland was considered by Italian nationalists unredeemed national soil.

The book is a very traditional political biography. Pombeni gives a basic sketch of De Gasperi's social background and early years; but once his protagonist enters politics in the early 1900s, references to anything but politics disappear. What Pomboni offers is an extremely detailed analysis of De Gasperi's political life from the early start as leader of the Italian-speaking Catholic Students Union to his career as a journalist and editor of the newspaper Il Trentino and as a member of the Austrian Parliament (from 1911) and the Tirol Diet (from 1914) representing the Catholic Popular Party of Trentino. Inspired by the Christian Social Party of Karl Lueger whose policies he got to know firsthand as a student in Vienna, De Gasperi worked successfully both as journalist and as political activist to turn the Trentino Catholic Party into a modern party with a strong popular base. Another key characteristic is De Gasperi's focus on “political realism.” This was evident in his slight interest in Catholic orthodoxy but also when it came to the crucial theme of nationalism. De Gasperi argued for a “positive nationalism” that favored an autonomist approach to the national question, instead of the irredentist position of his liberal and socialist opponents in Trentino, and at the same time fought incessantly against the Germanization attempts by German-Tirolese nationalists.

De Gasperi's nationalism is at the center of Pombeni's book. A major reason for this is that opponents, both in the 1920s and in the 1950s, accused De Gasperi of having been pro-Austrian. Pombeni argues vehemently against such interpretations. He demonstrates that De Gasperi strongly opposed the German-Tirolese nationalists. Pombeni accepts that De Gasperi perceived Italian identity within a Habsburg framework until the war years when Austrian repression of the Italian minority and the crisis of the empire radicalized his position. However, he argues convincingly that this must be understood within De Gasperi's overall “political realism”: unification with Italy was not a viable option until 1918.

The book is evidently written for Italian readers. For readers already well versed in the political history of the late empire, most of the contextualization of the life of De Gasperi is well known and Pombeni offers nothing new here. However, the analysis of Trentino politics is to a high degree based on primary sources and should command broader interest.

In many ways the biography reads as a defense of the protagonist. It is a well-argued defense although it has its clear shortcomings. De Gasperi's importance within Trentino political Catholicism is, to put it mildly, not underestimated; and Pombemi often oversells the quality of De Gasperi's political analyses. With the exception of Pombeni's pointing to the anti-Semitic strand in some of De Gasperi's writings, there is not much of a critical perspective. Although the analysis of De Gasperi's “positive nationalism” is quite convincing, there is an odd blank spot when it comes to the links between nationalism and Catholicism. Was it really only “realism” that led De Gasperi to think his Italian national identity within an Austrian framework? For all the state–church frictions in the later Habsburg Empire, this was still a clearly Catholic state whereas the pope considered himself a prisoner in the Italian nation-state. For devout Catholics, this must have been a central argument against irredentism. However, Pombeni does not address this issue.