A few years ago I had to ring up the War Graves Association in South Tyrol.
An Alpine glacier near the Austrian-Italian border was melting and had revealed the bodies of three soldiers, killed in the bloody mountain battles of the World War I.
The phone was answered by a man who spoke German with a strong Tyrolean accent.
"Were these soldiers from the Austrian army or the Italian army?" I asked.
"They were part of the Austrian army," he said.
"And where were they found?" I asked.
"In the Ortler Alps," he replied. "It used to be Austria, but now it is Italy - unfortunately."
South Tyrol, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was annexed to Italy in 1919, at the end of the World War I. The Italians wanted to have control of the Alps, south of the Brenner Pass.
Many people here are native German speakers. And a few of them, like the man from the War Graves Association, are still not reconciled to the fact that the province has been part of Italy for almost a century.
In the 1920s and 30s, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini encouraged Italians from the south to settle in the region.
German was widely banned, in schools, in courts and in public offices, and place names were "Italianised".
It all contributed to what one local author described to me as the "longstanding hostility" between the two language groups. » | Bethany Bell, BBC News, Bolzano, Italy | Saturday, December 08, 2012
