Bridging geographical research and political action: the Trentino Italian region in the scientific and socialist writings of Cesare Battisti, 1895–1914

Abstract

Scholars in the history of geography have paid close attention to the way geographical research has contributed to the development of scientific and political concepts such as ‘region’ and ‘nation’. This paper focuses on the life and writings of Cesare Battisti (1875–1916), a native of the city of Trento who became renowned in Italy and Austria-Hungary as a socialist and a geographer at the beginning of the twentieth century. To understand his thought, this paper collects and examines Battisti’s scientific outputs and published political papers, along with previously unstudied private writings from his archive (1895-1914). The result is a portrait of Battisti as someone who was outside of national geographical traditions; an entangled intellectual who used different geographical, political, and philosophic tools and methods to legitimate his political claims. In particular, the paper suggests that the idea of Trentino as a region was construed through an anticolonial discourse aimed at supporting the region’s claim for autonomy within the Austro-Hungarian empire. This study of Battisti, therefore, offers valuable insights into the emergence of left-wing nationalist and regional discourses, which arose from Italian and Central European socialist networks before the First World War.