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This chapter provides a historical account of the economic forces at work in shaping the life of the mountain peasantry, and discusses the ways in which different forces molded the economic fate of the South Tyrolese and Trentine peasantry. It shows how the development and distribution of these forces affected the Anaunia, the upland valley within which St. Felix and Tret are located. The chapter also examines the Middle Ages; the early modern period; Tyrol and Trentino; the economic margin of the state; changing economic relations; the fascist interlude; and the postwar boom.

Jaro Stacul investigates the consequences of an Italian party’s discourse about the countryside, and how it has dovetailed with local concerns. He discusses the rise of the Lega Nord (Northern League) in the 1990s, a time of national disenchantment with established parties, then widely seen as deeply corrupt. Leaders of the populist Lega called for the recreation of a lost ‘authenticity’ and a traditional sense of community, propagating an idea of a northern Italian culture, denigrating southerners as lazy and parasitic, and criticizing the state as the distant imposer of an alienating ‘civilization’. To these rhetoricians, it was the northern countryside which was the repository of laudatory values, in particular an ethic of hard work. To the Trentino villagers, with whom he did fieldwork and whose area had not been incorporated into Italy until the end of the First World War, the Lega was attractive because they regarded the state as remote, if not indeed foreign, and as responsible for creating a National Park in their area. The state saw the park as a wild, public space; locals saw it as a restrictive practice which curtailed the exercise of their traditional practices, such as hunting, which they had carried out on land they regarded as cultivated, in effect private property.

This chapter takes the analysis of the veterans’ movement a step further by providing a case study of one of the Habsburg Monarchy’s Italian-speaking areas, which have been less well served by recent research. In the southern Italian-speaking part of Tyrol, unofficially known as Trentino, military veterans’ associations emerged in the 1870s, before expanding more rapidly after 1900 as part of a new wave of socio-economic organizations in the countryside. As well as analyzing in detail the main types of patriotic activity undertaken by veterans, the chapter discusses their role in the process of politicization as political Catholicism challenged the dominance of National-Liberal elites.

According to the most commonly accepted figures, the experience of displacement in Italy between 1915 and 1918 affected about 600,000 civilians, either forced to leave their homes or voluntarily fleeing to the internal regions of the state. The civilians registered as ‘displaced persons’ at the end of war mostly originated from the north-eastern provinces of the Italian peninsula, which since May 1915 had been war zones and which in late 1917 following the Italian defeat at Caporetto were invaded by the Austrian and German armies. The chapter shows how refugees from Trentino were legally supported and subsidised as compatriots in Italy. In terms of everyday life, however, they did not integrate themselves into the host community, with the exception of those places where irredentist groups were active. On the contrary, they demonstrated pro-Italian feelings only in order to gain concrete benefits, to avoid internment, and to gain the respect of the local population. Most of them kept a low profile.