Bolzano
Bolzano historical timeline
History
Bolzano was a German-speaking market town for seven hundred years and has spent the last hundred negotiating what it is now.
The market
The Bishop of Trento laid out the arcaded merchant street around 1180, and Bolzano grew rich on the fairs where German and Italian traders met — the reason the city existed at all, and the origin of its bilingual commercial habit.
Tyrol
From the thirteenth century the town belonged to the County of Tyrol and then to the Habsburgs, and it stayed Austrian, and overwhelmingly German-speaking, until the First World War.
1919
The Treaty of Saint-Germain gave the whole of South Tyrol to Italy, against the wishes of a population that was around ninety per cent German-speaking. The Allies had promised the territory to Italy in 1915 to bring it into the war.
Italianisation
Under Fascism German schooling was banned, place names were replaced wholesale with inventions by Ettore Tolomei, German was excluded from courts and offices, and industry was built on the edge of the city specifically to bring in Italian-speaking workers. Bolzano's Italian-speaking majority dates from this.
The Option
In 1939 Hitler and Mussolini agreed that South Tyroleans must choose: take German citizenship and leave, or stay and be assimilated. About eighty-six per cent opted to go and some seventy-five thousand actually left. Families were split and the wound is not closed.
Autonomy
Postwar agreement, then a bombing campaign through the 1950s and 60s, then the Second Autonomy Statute of 1972, which devolved real power. The dispute was formally settled at the United Nations in 1992.