While talking with a friend this morning, at some point he mentioned he saw a statue of Guglielmo Oberdan in Venezia. I recalled streets and squares named after him in several Italian cities but didn’t know who he was, so I decided to look it up on the Internet and I was impressed by what I found.
Guglielmo Oberdan was born in Trieste in 1858. Back then, the Italian nation struggled to reunite under a single kingdom and Guglielmo lived his youth during Garibaldi’s legendary fights. Garibaldi couldn’t conquer Trieste, so that remained domain of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. People from Trieste strongly felt they had to fight to become part of Italy. The revolting movement was know as irredentism.
Guglielmo moved to Vienna to study engineering, but escaped to Rome – he deserted – when he was called in the Austrian army to go conquer Bosnia-Herzegovina. While in Rome, in 1882 he participated to the funeral ceremony for Garibaldi and quickly decided he had to do something to make Trieste rise and declare independence from Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, even if that needed the sacrifice of his own life. While traveling to Trieste to pursue his plot, he was captured and sentenced to death for allegedly planning to kill the emperor.
Now, the interesting fact is this guy was called a terrorist by Austrian, while he is known as a martyr of freedom in Italy. Sounds pretty similar to what happens nowadays in Palestine or Iraq, doesn’t it? Maybe both sides are biased and the truth is somewhere in the middle, and this story tells us that we should always check both versions.
