rather monotonous and uninteresting valley of the Adige until, just as
the sun was sinking behind the Adamello, whose snowy flanks were bathed
in the rosy _Alpenglow_, we came roaring into Trent, the capital and
center of the Trentino, which, together with Trieste and its adjacent
territory, composed the regions commonly referred to by Italians before
the war as _Italia Irredenta_--Unredeemed Italy.

Rooms had been reserved for us at the Hotel Trento, a famous tourist
hostelry in pre-war days, which had been used as headquarters by the
field-marshal commanding the Austrian forces in the Trentino, signs of
its military occupation being visible in the scratched wood-work and
ruined upholstery. The spurs of the Austrian staff officers on duty in
Trent, as Major Rupert Hughes once remarked of the American staff
officers on duty in Washington, must have been dripping with furniture
polish.

Trent--or Trento, as its new owners call it--is a place of some 30,000
inhabitants, built on both banks of the Adige, in the center of a great
bowl-shaped valley which is completely hemmed in by towering mountain
walls. In the church of Santa Maria Maggiore the celebrated Council of
Trent sat in the middle of the sixteenth century for nearly a decade. On
the eastern side of the town rises the imposing Castello del Buon
Consiglio, once the residence of the Prince-Bishops but now a barracks
for Italian soldiery.

No one who knows Trent can question the justice of Italy's claims to the
city and to the rich valleys surrounding it, for the history, the
traditions, the language, the architecture and the art of this region
are as characteristically Italian as though it had never been outside
the confines of the kingdom. The system of mild and fertile Alpine