Trento historical timeline

Trento was ruled by its bishops for nearly eight hundred years, and everything here follows from that.

The prince-bishops

In 1027 the Emperor granted the Bishop of Trent temporal power over the territory, and the bishops governed as sovereign princes until Napoleon abolished the arrangement in 1803. The city was an ecclesiastical state on the border between the Empire and Italy.

The Council

Between 1545 and 1563 the Catholic Church held twenty-five sessions here, in the cathedral and in Santa Maria Maggiore. Trento was chosen precisely because it was on the language border and both the Empire and the papacy could accept it. The Council defined doctrine, reformed the clergy, standardised the Mass and set the shape of Catholicism until the 1960s.

Austria

After 1803 Trentino passed to Austria and stayed there for over a century, as an Italian-speaking territory inside a German-speaking empire.

Battisti

Cesare Battisti, a Trentino socialist and geographer elected to the Vienna parliament, deserted to Italy in 1915, was captured in 1916 and hanged in the castle moat. He is the city's defining modern figure and the argument about him is still live.

1918

Annexation to Italy was welcomed here by most of the population, because Trentino was Italian-speaking — the exact opposite of what happened an hour north in Bolzano, with consequences that still divide the region.

The war

Trento was bombed heavily in 1943 and 1944 because of its rail junction, and a good part of the area around the station is postwar rebuilding rather than old fabric.

Autonomy

Since 1972 Trento has been an autonomous province with wide powers and a budget most Italian regions would envy.