Cesare Battisti (politician)

Cesare Battisti
Cesare Battisti in Milan, 1915
Born	Giuseppe Cesare Battisti 4 February 1875 Trento
Died	16 July 1916(1916-07-16) (aged 41) Trento

Cesare Battisti (4 February 1875 – 12 July 1916) was an Italian patriot, geographer, socialist politician and journalist of Austrian citizenship, who became a prominent Irredentist at the start of the First World War.

He was born the son of a merchant at Trento, a city with a predominantly Italian-speaking population, which at the time was part of the Cisleithanian crown land of Tyrol in Austria-Hungary. Battisti attended the University of Florence, where he became a follower the Italian irredentism movement, aiming at the unification of his Trentino homeland with the Kingdom of Italy, though contrary to activists like Ettore Tolomei and Gabriele d'Annunzio, he did not claim the predominantly German-speaking areas of South Tyrol up to the Brenner Pass.

A journalist by profession and a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria, he was elected as a representative to the Tyrolean Landtag assembly at Innsbruck as well as to the Austrian Imperial Council (Reichsrat) at Vienna in 1911, where he vainly tried to obtain a status of autonomy for the Trentino region. Disgruntled by Austro-Hungarian attitudes to minorities in their empire, Battisti agreed to construct a military guide for the Italians to Austrian provinces that bordered Italy.