“Giovanni Prati” High School

Cesare Battisti was born in Trento in 1875 as the youngest of eight siblings. Trento was at that time under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He attends the high school “Imperial Regio Ginnasio” (today “Giovanni Prati” High school) where the Austrian educational model rewards obedient students, neglects the Italian literature and imposes several bans on students’ lives, even out of the school. Battisti feels uncomfortable in this situation and founds a secret association with some classmates, publishing also a clandestine magazine on poetry, history and politics.

In 1893 Battisti enrolls at the Institute of Higher Education in Florence; the following year he attends Turin University and Graz University, but in the end he returns definitively to Florence where he graduates in 1897 in Geography.

Battisti is not the only student from Trento attending University in Italy. Since 1866, the year in which Padua was annexed to Italy, Italians living in the areas under the Austro-Hungarian Empire no longer have a University in Italian.

The University issue is one of the most important in the struggle for Autonomy by the Italian minority in these areas. In 1904 the jurist Francesco Menestrina begins a series of lectures in Italian at the Law University in Innsbruck and this is enough to provoke a violent attack by German nationalists against Italian students.

Battisti and many other important figures of Trento – including Alcide De Gasperi – instead of being defended, are incarcerated.

Ph: Ilaria Bionda