Ettore Tolomei

Ettore Tolomei (16 August 1865 in Rovereto – 25 May 1952 in Rome) was an Italian nationalist and fascist. He was designated a Member of the Italian Senate in 1923, and ennobled as Conte della Vetta in 1937.

Born into a nationalistically oriented family (that rejected the Austrian domination of his Trentino and supported the Italian irredentism), after his studies in Florence and Rome Tolomei became associated with the nationalistic Dante Alighieri Society. After graduation in 1888 he taught in Italian schools at Tunis, Thessaloniki, İzmir and Cairo. He returned to Italy in 1901 and was appointed Inspector General of Italian Schools Abroad by the Foreign Ministry's Office.

His nationalistic activities had begun in 1890 with the founding of the weekly magazine La Nazione Italiana (The Italian Nation), a propagandistic publication whose aim was to popularize the positions of the Dante Alighieri Society. Its articles dwelled mainly on the issue of Trento and Trieste, then still under Austro-Hungarian rule, but covered other areas including the Levant and North Africa, anticipating the fascist dream of a new Mediterranean empire.

As the end of the century neared, Tolomei's activities began to focus on the northern boundaries of Italy. To him, this natural boundary was the main watershed of the Alps near Reschen Pass and Brenner Pass, even though few Italians lived in this mostly German-speaking area of the Austrian Empire.

In this early phase, he saw the Ladins (a group speaking a Rhaeto-Romance language which inhabited the mountainous areas in what was then the eastern part of Southern Tyrol, a territory now divided between South Tyrol, Trentino and the province of Belluno) as the Latin element through which "an Italian-Ladinic wedge" could be driven into the Germanic-speaking region, which in those days he called Alto Trentino - Upper Trentino, not having yet devised the name Alto Adige - High Adige, a creation which would become the official Italian designation for the province after World War I up to this day.

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