Historical story

Who was Cesare Battisti, the Italian hero in the First World War?

In recent days there has been a lot of talk about Cesare Battisti , a criminal who after many years of inaction has finally been handed over to Italian justice, but there is a big problem around his name, it is a case (not very accidental) of homonymy that is pushing many Italians these days to believe that the Italian patriot and hero Cesare Battisti born in Trento on February 4, 1875 and died in Trento on July 12, 1916, after which streets, monuments and squares are named throughout the country, both Cesare Battisti himself arrested in Bolivia in 2018.

It is actually a case of not very casual homonymy, the two Cesare Battisti share the name, for historical reasons, and both were arrested abroad (one in Italy as an Austrian citizen, the other in Bolivia as a citizen Italian) and subsequently taken to their country of origin to be tried and serve their sentence, in addition both were associated, for propaganda reasons, with a precise political identity ( one was associated with Fascism, the other with Communism ) without ever being really associated with those parties and without ever having really had the support of those political currents, but we try to clarify and understand who, really, was the Cesare Battisti that we remember in our streets.

One of the strongest and most authoritative voices of Italian interventionism, before the Great War, was that of Cesare Battisti, who, like Mussolini and Marinetti , fought for Italy to enter the war. Battisti, then a socialist deputy in the Viennese parliament, representative of the city of Trento, in 1914 left his parliamentary post and came to Italy, where he held a series of meetings in squares and theaters, to sensitize Italian intellectuals and convince them that Italy should go to war to free his Trento from Austrian rule.

In 1915, when Italy entered the war against Austria Battisti was one of the first to volunteer in the ranks of the Italian army, or rather, of the Alpine Corps, although he was not a citizen of the kingdom of Italy, and he left at the front, to fight against the Austrian army. He found himself fighting especially against him former fellow citizens, people he knew, many of the soldiers he fought against were his friends, relatives, people who had voted and elected him to the Viennese parliament.

During the war, however, during an Austrian advance, Cesare Battisti was taken prisoner by the enemy army and led to Tento, here he was tried and sentenced to hang as a traitor, for having conspired and fought against the Austro-Hungarian Empire of which he was a citizen. He was hanged in Trento on 12 July 1916 and his last words were “Long live Italian Trento! Long live Italy! " .

After the end of the war, with the advent of fascism in Italy and the Italian occupation of the city of Trento, Battisti was proclaimed National Hero, and his name was raised in the Olympus of the kingdom of Italy becoming an icon of Italian nationalism and fascism (even though he was not a fascist and his family always denied that Battisti was a fascist, claiming instead his socialist ideology).

During the reign of Italy countless streets, squares and monuments throughout Italy were named after Battisti and in his honor, many Italian families called their children "cesare" (according to the registry records, during the years of fascism Cesare was one of the trendiest names in Italy after Benito and Vittorio) .