The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the Ægean | Page 4

the hairpin mountain turns. Now I am
perfectly willing to travel as fast as any one, if necessity demands it,
but to tear through a region as beautiful as Venetia at sixty miles an
hour, with the incomparable landscape whirling past in a confused blur,
like a motion-picture film which is being run too fast because the
operator is in a hurry to get home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is
unnecessary. Like all Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted
on keeping his cut-out wide open, thereby producing a racket like a
machine-gun, which, though it gave warning of our approach when we
were still a mile away, made any attempt at conversation, save by
shouting, out of the question.
Because I wished to follow Italy's new frontiers from their very
beginning, at that point where the boundaries of Italy, Austria and
Switzerland meet near the Stelvio Pass, our course from Venice lay
northwestward, across the dusty plains of Venetia, shimmering in the
summer heat, the low, pleasant-looking villas of white or pink or
sometimes pale blue stucco, set far back in blazing gardens, peering
coyly out at us from between the ranks of stately cypresses which lined
the highway, like daintily-gowned girls seeking an excuse for a
flirtation. Dotting the Venetian plain are many quaint and charming
towns of whose existence the tourist, traveling by train, never dreams,
their massive walls, sometimes defended by moats and draw-bridges,
bearing mute witness to this region's stormy and romantic past.
Towering above the red-tiled roofs of each of these Venetian
plain-towns is its slender campanile, and, as each campanile is of
distinctive design, it serves as a landmark by which the town can be
identified from afar. Through the narrow, cobble-paved streets of
Vicenza we swept, between rows of shops opening into cool, dim,
vaulted porticoes, where the townspeople can lounge and stroll and
gossip without exposing themselves to rain or sun; through Rovereto,
noted for its silk-culture and for its old, old houses, superb examples of
the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages, with faded frescoes on
their quaint façades; and so up the rather monotonous and uninteresting

valley of the Adige until, just as the sun was sinking behind the
Adamello, whose snowy flanks were bathed in the rosy Alpenglow, we
came roaring into Trent, the capital and center of the Trentino, which,
together with Trieste and its adjacent territory, composed the regions
commonly referred to by Italians before the war as Italia
Irredenta--Unredeemed Italy.
Rooms had been reserved for us at the Hotel Trento, a famous tourist
hostelry in pre-war days, which had been used as headquarters by the
field-marshal commanding the Austrian forces in the Trentino, signs of
its military occupation being visible in the scratched wood-work and
ruined upholstery. The spurs of the Austrian staff officers on duty in
Trent, as Major Rupert Hughes once remarked of the American staff
officers on duty in Washington, must have been dripping with furniture
polish.
Trent--or Trento, as its new owners call it--is a place of some 30,000
inhabitants, built on both banks of the Adige, in the center of a great
bowl-shaped valley which is completely hemmed in by towering
mountain walls. In the church of Santa Maria Maggiore the celebrated
Council of Trent sat in the middle of the sixteenth century for nearly a
decade. On the eastern side of the town rises the imposing Castello del
Buon Consiglio, once the residence of the Prince-Bishops but now a
barracks for Italian soldiery.
No one who knows Trent can question the justice of Italy's claims to
the city and to the rich valleys surrounding it, for the history, the
traditions, the language, the architecture and the art of this region are as
characteristically Italian as though it had never been outside the
confines of the kingdom. The system of mild and fertile Alpine valleys
which compose the so-called Trentino have an area of about 4,000
square miles and support a population of 380,000 inhabitants, of whom
375,000, according to a census made by the Austrians themselves, are
Italian. An enclave between Lombardy and Venetia, a rough triangle
with its southern apex at the head of the Lake of Garda, the Trentino,
originally settled by Italian colonists who went forth as early as the
time of the Roman Republic, was for centuries an independent Italian

prince-bishopric, being arbitrarily annexed to Austria upon the fall of
Napoleon. In spite of the tyrannical and oppressive measures pursued
by the Austrian authorities in their attempts to stamp out the affection
of the Trentini for their Italian motherland, in spite of the systematic
attempts to Germanicize the region, in spite of the fact that it was an
offense punishable by imprisonment to wear the Italian colors, to sing
the Italian national hymn, or to