STEFAN MALFÈR

Studenti italiani a Vienna, Graz e Innsbruck, 1848-1918  

N. 3/1985

Summary — In the first section of this article the a. summarizes the main lines of the historical development of the so-called "italienische Universitätsfrage" (Italian university problem) within the Habsburg monarchy. This problem arose when Austria lost the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia, so that its Italian citizens from the Adriatic region, Dalmatia and the Italian Tyrol, who till then had been able to attend the Universities of Pavia and Padua, were deprived of a university institution in their mother-tongue within the Austrian state. The a. deals with the unsuccessful and unsatisfactory attempts of the Austrian government to give a solution to this problem and to meet the claims of its Italian subjects, but his main interest lies in a statistical and social analysis of the Italian students who attended Austrian-German universities and especially those of Vienna, 1866 and 1918. The author suggests Graz and Innsbruch in the years between that even before 1866 most of the students coming from Trieste, Gorizia and Gradisca, Istria, Dalmatia and Trentino attended German universities, so that the claim for an Italian university was predominantly based on political reasons.

First of all the a. tries to verify the exact number of Italian students at the Austrian imperial universities, making an extensive use of primary sources. His conclusions are that the rate of young people enrolled in a university institution was much higher among Italians than among other national groups in the Austrian monarchy who were lacking of a national university.

With regard to their distribution between different institutions, Vienna and Graz were the main poles of attraction for the Italian students, while the percentage of students enrolled at Innsbruch declined, as a consequence of the tense political and national atmosphere which developed in the capital of Tyrol. Most of the Italian students were enrolled at the faculty of law, but the number of those attending other fields of studies was in slow but constant increase. The last section of the essay is devoted, on the basis of archival sources and mainly on information given by the students concerning the professional activities of their fathers, to the social background of the students. A slow but steady increase of people coming from a modest background can be noticed.