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Show ll 1 I i1 mVi -iK'-r'Jjda Til i. c , ? i i If;, zr - v if Old Consiglio Castle in Trent. By LLOYD ALLEN, Special Staff Correspondent. I (Copyright, 1919, by Western Newspaper Union.) TRENT, In the upper valley of the Adige, has just been restored re-stored to Italy, and at the peace conference the final pact between the nations that fought Germany will undoubtedly give Trent to the Italian nation for all time. Leaving Padua early in the' morning morn-ing in one of the powerful .automobiles of the Italian supreme command, in the first party of newspaper men to visit these lands reclaimed from Austria, Aus-tria, I arrived in Trent by way of Verona after a five-hour ride, during which we passed through the wrecked villages that mark the old mountain battle fronts of the Austrian and Italian Ital-ian armies. Along the fine rock roadways that run along the Adige river, a swift-flowing swift-flowing moutain stream, a small line of refugees was plodding along, on foot for the most part, returning to homesteads home-steads deserted during more than two years of war. Just a few miles north of Verona the first sight of war's destruction was the little wrecked village of Marco, Mar-co, for two years under shell fire. As we passed through the place the evidences evi-dences of battle were still ample. Austrian Aus-trian trench helmets, clips of cartridges car-tridges and discarded trench spades were to be seen scattered among the piles of stone and timber of wrecked homes. The beautifully frescoed village vil-lage church was nothing but a shell of walls. On the roadway leading up to Marco hundreds of Austro-Huugariau prisoners prison-ers were busy repairing the roadbeds. Some wore their very ornamental dress overcoats lavish in the display of knotted braid and fur. Towns of the Trentino. Trent in itself is a rather inconsiderable inconsid-erable town. It had a war-time population pop-ulation of some 25,000 persons, a large majority of whom were Italians, we were told. In peace times the population popula-tion is around 40,000. But in tlio whole province of Trentino there are more than half a million people, and it is the province, as well as the town, that Italy fought for at the cost of 400,000 men killed and nearly a million wounded. Back of the Italian demand for the Trentino is a sentimental reason, and a practical commercial reason. For the sentimental and national side first, Italy points out, through her biggest statesmen, generals and propagandists, that 420,000 of the 000,000 persons living liv-ing in the Trentino are Italians speaking speak-ing the Italian language. Trent as well as the smaller towns in the Trentino, such as Rovereto, Ala, Areo, Levico and Pergine, are tilled with buildings of Italian design, decorated with Italian art and using the Italian language in the schools and offices. We passed through several of these Only through centuries of careful, work with hoe and plow has it been possible to create the garden that extends ex-tends from Verona, where the Adige river strikes the Venetian plain, to the-impassable the-impassable , mountain valleys many -miles away where the absolute absence of soil forbids any attempt at fanning. fann-ing. The fields on either side of the river riv-er are broken into small lots, thousands thou-sands being as small as a city block; many are much smaller in order to completely fill a segment of rock-locked earth. On these plots, that have been leveled with infinite care, the farmer of the Trentino grows grain, garden truck, grapes, and often other fruit. The grapevines are kept pruned to about four and a half feet high for the main stem, which grows to the thickness of a man's wrist, while the tendrils are trained onto sticks, or in many cases to trees that are kept ; pruned down to a thick stump six or seven feet high with small branches half an inch in thickness protruding in a sheaf from the stump. Ancient Consiglio Castle. During the middle ages Trent was a typical fortified city crowned with an ; old feudal castle. Built in 1490, this stronghold, Castle Consiglio, has come down to the present generation in a , beautiful state of preservation. While the Austrians held Trent the place was used as a kind of town jail. Ceasare Battisti, native of Trent, an ardent pro-Italian who had the nerve to enlist in the Italian army against Austria, was shot in the courtyard of the castle, and is today the town and the Italian nation's martyr. Stored in the wonderful old castle were S0.000 captured Austrian rifles. Piles of gas masks, trench tools, murderous mur-derous trench knives and other odds and ends of fighting manjs equipment were stacked in several of the large rooms. - In one of the main corridors was a typical Austrian torture machine. It consisted of two rings, the first about nine inches from the floor and the second about four feet above ground. The practice was to fasten a prisoner's prison-er's ankles to the lower ring by means of a piece of rope, while the unfortunate unfortu-nate man's hands were tied behind him through the upper ring. This threw all the prisoners' weight ou the wrists and ankle. Usually a man fainted afte;- several hours. Inspection of the old Consiglio castle cas-tle revealed how the war machine of the sixteenth century for the caslle ilself was a fort had been made to serve the purposes of the twentieth century war lords. In the highest room of the place, a circular chamber of the tallest tower, was all that remained of a German wireless outfit. The operators had ... . i.t , - 1., lin niaiie tnemseives eoniioriamc m damp old place by putting storm windows win-dows in the loopholes that were originally orig-inally cut for the convenience of crossbow cross-bow men. To get to the tower one has to pass through a frescoed courtyard where nu :i were banned centuries ago. About live or six fort from the old gallows, a double affair, runs a sheltered gallery gal-lery from which the dukes and their courtiers, sheltered from the weather, could witness the execution. Some of the public squares In the city of Trent have line old bulldln.us in Italian architecture, decorated from ground to roof with gorgeous frescoes, the coloring of which Is still vivid. low ns. j.ne people on me streets were as Italian as the street crowds of Padua, Verona and Vincenza, cities of tlio Venetian plain through which we passed in the earlier stages of our trip. Signs, decades old, on the buildings of the Trentino were in Italian, advertising adver-tising the wares certain Italian merchants mer-chants were trying to sell. The practical reasons that Italy has for keeping her tricolor flying from the mountain citle of the Trentino are numerous and vill. Every Available Inch Tilled. First of all the Trentino is a very productive region where vineyards and grain fields flourish on both sides of the Adige, producing large quantities of foods, it can be said truthfully that every ivailable Inch of land In this section Is In a slate of cultivation. To an American fanner tho intense method of. soil tilling would prove a revelation. |