The “suspended country”—or das Land in der Schwebe—referred to in this book has an official birth date. On 30 May 1816, during a lavish ceremony in the streets and squares of Innsbruck, Francis I of Habsburg celebrated the establishment of the Kronland Tirol. Among others, this new province of the Austrian Empire comprised territories that had belonged to the Habsburg dynasty for hundreds of years (Nordtirol, Südtirol, Vorarlberg), as well as the ecclesiastical principalities of Trent and Brixen, which were part of the Holy Roman Empire but not subjected to the Habsburg's immediate authority. For a century, until 1918, Tyrol's borders were those set by Francis I with his Staatsakt. Despite its endurance, however, the decision made in 1816 was neither easy nor promptly accepted by all. Indeed, it was reached at the end of twenty years of wars, revolutions, and political and economic crises, during which the drawing of different borders had seemed possible.

The building of the Tyrolean province, as stated in the book's title, occurred over the course of three years, starting in the autumn of 1813, when the Austrian regiments occupied Tyrol during the final war against Napoleon, and ending late in the spring of 1816. In actual fact, as may be surmised upon reading the essays contained in the book—fourteen of them in Italian and seven of them in German, the result of a conference held in Trento in 2016—the transition phase stretched over a far longer period of time, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Army of Italy led by a young Napoleon Bonaparte reached Trento-Tyrol. After the winter of 1796, the territory was quickly divided up and reassembled. Following some months under the French Republic's government, in 1803, there was a first instance of Austrian domination (during which the ecclesiastical principalities were secularized). In 1805, after the victory at Austerlitz and the Peace of Pressburg, Napoleon surrendered the region to the allied Kingdom of Bavaria, which governed it until the rebellion led by Andreas Hofer famously broke out in 1809. Subsequently, with the Treaty of Schönbrunn, Napoleon decided to split Tyrol in two, and to assign the southern part (the so-called Department of Alto Adige) to the Kingdom of Italy, leaving the remaining part to the Kingdom of Bavaria.

The constant changes in sovereignty did not merely alter the borders between states but also left deep marks on the lives of the Tyroleans. The essays of Franco Cagol, Mirko Saltori, and Ellinor Forster investigate the biographies of some of the people who lived through that eventful period. Bavarian domination was something of a point of no return. Within a few years, residues of the old regime were swept away: the Landtag was closed, the Bavarian legislation was adopted, and feudal jurisdictions were abolished and replaced with state officials answering exclusively to the court of Munich. This administrative rationalization had an impact on lay and ecclesiastical aristocratic elites, which had already suffered the secularization measures enacted by Joseph II (addressed in the essay of S. Rampanelli and J. Reich). At the same time, however, a space was opened for the social promotion of homines novi hailing from both Italian- and German-speaking areas (on the one hand, current Trentino; on the other, current Alto Adige/Südtirol and the Austrian Tyrol). Under the Bavarian government, the bourgeois Antonio Mazzetti and Andreas Dipauli started their successful legal careers, which continued during the subsequent Napoleonic period, and were ultimately enhanced once the Austrian rule was reinstated in 1813. Alongside them were representatives from the old eighteenth-century patriciate, who managed to secure posts from the French, the Bavarians, and finally, the Austrians; all in all, these were “decorative” positions, however, for the bureaucratic machine was run by people who could boast university degrees and a long apprenticeship in public offices (for example, the judges employed in the courts of law studied by Francesca Brunet).

The Bavarian and Napoleonic presence (1805–13) provoked different reactions throughout the Tyrolean province: generally hostile in areas where the Habsburgs had a firm footing (U. Pistoia), more favorable in areas once belonging to the ecclesiastical principality of Trent, the southern part of the Land, inhabited by the Italian-speaking population. In Trentoi, the small capital of the Italian Tyrol (Welschtirol), new forms of cultural sociability were experimented with (theaters, cafés, clubs, salons) that engaged members of the nobility and bourgeoisie appreciative of the value of art and its public communication (A. Carlini and R. Pancheri). Nevertheless, there were also those who resisted change, as in the fields of education and publishing: the former continued to be led by clergymen, whereas the latter saw few printshops active and only a small number of books going to press (Q. Antonelli, G. Zancanella).

Thus, at the end of 1813, the returning Habsburgs found Tyrol in the midst of transitioning from the old to the new regime. The creation of a single province, administratively homogeneous yet multilingual and extremely varied both economically and socially, forced the Austrian government not to dismantle most of the measures introduced during the Napoleonic period. The “restoration” of old Tyrolean institutions, such as the Landtag or the feudal jurisdictions (addressed in the volume's opening essays by F. Huber, S. Barbacetto, M. Nequirito, and N. Zini), is not openly at odds with the French-Bavarian innovations. For example, while the reinstating of feudal jurisdictions or the Landtag of Innsbruck contributed to creating the image of Tyrol as a place “suspended” between old and new, following the Congress of Vienna their activity was in fact gradually hollowed out by the Austrian bureaucracy.

Each of the former Napoleonic territories once again annexed to the empire—Tyrol, Lombardy-Venetia, Vorarlberg, Salzburg, certain districts of the Illyrian provinces (addressed in M. Meriggi's, W. Scheffknecht's, M. Lanzinger's, and J. Lahner's essays)—is a case unto itself: the ease of transition in each depended on how deeply-rooted the Napoleonic institutions had been there. For this reason, the Central-Organisirungs-Hofkommission in Vienna, whose aim it was to organize the new provinces, proceeded with caution everywhere: sometimes showing itself to be more incisive, sometimes more uncertain, as if tending to put off thornier problems. One of the most obvious difficulties was the relationship between the Italian- and German-speaking populations, which many contemporaries perceived to be a pressing matter. Indeed, as early as 1813, the judge Andreas Dipauli had suggested carefully balancing out the presence of Italian and German Tyroleans in the Landtag of Innsbruck: “daß die beyden Charakter, der deutsche und italienische sich mehr, als ehedem geschehen konnte, einander das Gleichgewicht halten” (230). His proposal went unheeded, but the fact it was left “suspended” would later be the cause of continual conflict.