Cultural Dissonance in the Italian Alps

In: Comparative studies in society and history, Band 5, Heft 1, S. 1-14

Abstract

Through the Eastern Alps runs one of the great cultural frontiers of Europe, the zone of contact between the cultural sphere of the Mediterranean and the transalpine cultures to the north. This frontier has shifted back and forth over time, as have the boundaries of language and of various dominant political units. One of the present foci of culture contact in a zone of dispute and discord is the present-day Italian region of Alto Adige or Tiroler Etschland (still called the South Tirol by unreconstructed defenders of the traditional unity of the Tyrol) and the Trentino. Unified in the first part of the 13th century under the Counts of the Tyrol, the region passed into the hands of the Habsburgs in 1363, where it remained until 1918 but for a brief interlude during the Napoleonic period. The Napoleonic occupation divided the region, yielding to Bavaria the largely German-speaking province of Bozen (Bolzano), together with the North Tyrol, while grouping the Romancespeaking portions with Italy. This division became the prototype of later efforts to divorce the Romance Tyrol from the German Tyrol, a division effected again in the provincial separation between Province Bozen and Province Trento after the entire region was yielded by Austria to Italy at the end of World War I. Except for a brief period near the end of World War II (1943 to 1945), when both provinces were grouped as Operationszone Alpenvorland with Gau Tyrol of the Greater German Reich, the region has remained politically part of Italy. It remains also, however, an area of conflict in which Italian political hegemony and cultural influence has been combatted by the German-speaking population, impelled by a desire for greater autonomy or complete separation from the Italian state.