Austria–Italy border

A wall with gaps

The border follows the main water divide of the Alps. North of it, the Inn and the Drava (Drau) drain to the Danube. South of it, the Adige, Piave and Tagliamento run to the Adriatic.^[1] Some peaks along the line are over 12,000 feet high, and many Italians have seen this mountain wall as their “natural” border against invasion from the north.^[1]

The wall has gaps. The main ones are the Resia (Reschen) Pass near Switzerland, the Brenner, the Dobbiaco (Toblach) Pass, the Monte Croce Carnico (Plöcken) Pass and the Tarvisio saddle.^[1] The Brenner, at 4,501 feet, carried a Roman road. German-speaking settlers crossed it into the valleys of South Tyrol in the early Middle Ages, and it has been one of Europe’s great trade routes since the 14th century.^[1]

There are two small exceptions to the watershed rule. The Drava rises about ten miles inside Italy and flows into Austria through the Dobbiaco Pass. Near the eastern end, the Gailitz (Slizza) also rises on the Italian side and crosses north through the Tarvisio saddle.^[1]

Two treaties, two halves

In the 13th century the counts of Tyrol united the upper Adige, Drava and Inn valleys into one principality of the Holy Roman Empire, spanning the Brenner. Apart from a spell under Napoleon (1805–13), the Tyrol stayed undivided until 1919.^[1]

Italy was unified in 1861. In the Treaty of Vienna of 3 October 1866, Austria gave up its Lombardo–Venetian Kingdom, and the new border ran along the crest of the Carnic Alps in the east. In the west it followed the southern edge of Austrian Tyrol, so Austria kept the land south of the main Alpine crest.^[1] That eastern stretch, east of a point near the Dobbiaco Pass, is still the border today.^[1]

In the decades before the First World War, Italians pressed more and more for a border at the Brenner. Austria was willing to give up Trentino, the Italian-speaking south of the Tyrol, but not German-speaking South Tyrol.^[1] In the secret Treaty of London of 1915, the Allies promised Italy all the Austrian land south of the Brenner if it joined the war on their side.^[1]

The Treaty of Saint-Germain, signed by the Allies and Austria on 10 September 1919, delivered it. Article 27 moved the western half of the border north to the watershed between the Inn and the Adige, and then between the Drava and the Adige.^[1] About 5,425 square miles, just over half of the Tyrol, went to Italy.^[1]

“…thence eastwards to the summit of the Dreiherrn Spitz (point 3505), the watershed between the basins of the Inn to the north and the Adige to the south…”^[1]

Marking the line

On 22 July 1920 the Allied Council of Ambassadors set up a delimitation commission. Where the treaty left a line “to be fixed on the ground”, the commission was told to follow existing administrative and property boundaries and natural features.^[1] Its members came from Italy, Britain, France, Japan and Austria, and they started work in the autumn of 1920.^[1]

Twenty-three spots turned out to be serious problems, but all were solved, and demarcation (marking the line on the ground) was finished in 1924. A record of 22 June 1922 fixed the eastern tripoint, then with Yugoslavia, at a pillar on Monte Forno.^[1]

High on the glaciers the job was harder. The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology says too much snow lay on the ground at the time to find the exact watershed near the Tisenjoch, so the line there was drawn “incorrectly”, though it is still valid in international law.^[2] That mattered in 1991, when hikers found the prehistoric body known as Ötzi, the Iceman, near the pass. An official survey on 2 October 1991 put the body 92.56 metres inside Italy.^[2]

South Tyrol

Austria’s 1910 census counted 215,796 German speakers in South Tyrol, 16,510 Italian speakers and 5,990 Ladins, who speak a language related to Swiss Romansh.^[1] After the Fascists took power in October 1922, Italy tried to force the German speakers to become Italian and encouraged Italians to move to Bolzano. People of Italian origin were under 10 percent of Bolzano province before the First World War and nearly 30 percent by 1939.^[1]

In October 1939 Germany and Italy agreed that German speakers in northern Italy would choose between moving to Germany and staying Italian. Of 267,000, 205,441 chose Germany. After 1945 Italy let 201,327 of them take back Italian citizenship.^[1]

After the Second World War, some officials, especially British ones, felt the 1919 decision had been unjust. In 1946 the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers decided the border should not change.^[1] Instead, on 5 September 1946 Italy and Austria signed an agreement promising equal rights and self-government to the German speakers. The Italian peace treaty of 10 February 1947 included it and confirmed the border as it stood on 1 January 1938.^[1] The Austrian State Treaty of 15 May 1955 did the same from the Austrian side.^[1]

When diplomatic efforts over the 1946 agreement stalled, Austria took the question of South Tyrol to the UN General Assembly in 1960, which called on the two countries to negotiate. Talks led in 1969 to the “South Tyrol Package” of measures and a timetable for carrying them out.^[3] The last measures took effect in 1992, and in June 1992 Austria and Italy handed identical declarations to the UN Secretary-General ending the dispute.^[3]

An open border that moves

Checks on travellers at the land border ended on 1 April 1998, when Austria and Italy became full members of the Schengen area.^[4] In April 2016, during Europe’s migrant crisis, Austria began building a barrier at the Brenner. Tyrol’s police chief said it would be 250 metres long and cover both the motorway and the main road.^[5] On 28 April the two interior ministers, Wolfgang Sobotka and Angelino Alfano, met in Rome, and Alfano said he had been assured that “no wall will be constructed”.^[6]

The line itself is shifting too. Where it crosses snowfields and glaciers, it exists only on official maps, and as the ice thins or retreats the watershed, and with it the border, moves.^[7] A 2006 agreement between Italy and Austria made this “moving border” law. Since 2008 Italy’s military mapping agency has surveyed the high border every two years to update the maps.^[7]