Trento

The origins of Trento are uncertain: some scholars see a Rhaetian settlement, others a Gaulish foundation of the 4th century BC. The Romans conquered it in the 1st century BC and named it Tridentum, "three-tooth place" — possibly for the three hills around the city — and it became a stop on the road from Verona to Innsbruck. In 1027 Emperor Conrad II made its bishops prince-bishops, with both religious and temporal power, and around 1200 silver from Monte Calisio made it a mining centre with the first mining code of the Alps.

In 1475 the city's small Jewish community was falsely accused of murdering a child, Simon of Trent; eight Jews were tortured and burned. Trento formally apologised in the 1990s. In the 16th century the prince-bishops Bernardo Clesio and Cristoforo Madruzzo brought the Council of Trent here (1545–1563), the Catholic Church's answer to the Protestant Reformation, and gave the word "Tridentine" to the world.

The prince-bishopric was secularised in 1802; Trento passed to Bavaria and Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, then to the Habsburgs in 1814, and the railway arrived in 1859. Under Austria it became, with Trieste, a symbol of Italian irredentism; the local irredentists Cesare Battisti and Damiano Chiesa were executed in the castle courtyard during the First World War, and Italy annexed the city in 1919. Allied bombing in 1944–45 hit churches and bridges but spared most of the old centre. Prosperity followed from the 1950s, helped by the province's autonomy.

The city wears its history on its walls. Restored late-medieval and Renaissance houses keep their pastel colours, wooden balconies and painted façades, and the old Latin motto on the town hall — "Mountains give me silver and the name of Trento" — recalls its mining past. The Council of Trent remains the city's great cultural reference, and the Diocesan Museum beside the cathedral tells its story.

Mountains shape the cultural calendar as much as history. The Trento Film Festival, founded in 1952 by the Italian Alpine Club and the city, is one of the oldest film festivals in Italy still running and is devoted to mountains, exploration and mountaineering. Each May the Festival dell'Economia fills the palazzi with economists explaining their subject to the public, and food and wine events run through the year. The Teatro Sociale dates from 1819.

Sport has a loyal following: Trentino Volley has won the Italian championship four times and the CEV Champions League three times, and Aquila Basket Trento plays in the top basketball league; the Giro al Sas road race, first run in 1907, still goes through the streets. Alcide De Gasperi, a founder of the European Union, and Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement, are among the figures associated with the city.

About 119,000 people lived in the municipality at the end of 2023, making it the third largest municipality in the Alps. The municipality is far larger than the city itself, taking in suburbs as different as industrial Gardolo to the north and small mountain hamlets on Monte Bondone.

As late as the Second World War the city depended on wine-making and silk. Post-war industry has largely gone; today Trento lives on commerce, services, tourism, high-quality farming and food, and research. The University of Trento, founded in 1962, has over 16,000 students in the city, and research centres such as the Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the Edmund Mach Foundation have earned the city and its university the nickname of a "Silicon Valley" of the Alps. The province is one of the richest in Italy, and the city often ranks near the top of national quality-of-life tables — third in 2023.

Daily life is unhurried and orderly. Students fill the old town and the hill suburb of Povo, families head to the mountains and lakes at weekends, and pink and white porphyry quarried nearby appears in many of its buildings, old and new.

Trento sits where Italian and Austrian kitchens meet, and its menus run from pizza to pork with sauerkraut. Canederli, the Knödel of the Alps, are boiled dumplings. Apples from the Val di Non, sold under the Melinda name, go into the local strudel, a staple of coffee-and-cake breaks in the cafés around Piazza Duomo.

Wine is the city's great product. Trento DOC is an appellation for sparkling white and rosé wine made in Trentino from Chardonnay, Pinot noir, Pinot Meunier and Pinot blanc; the Teroldego grape makes the local red, and Nosiola, a white grape grown north of Lake Garda in the Valle dei Laghi, is used in still wines and in the sweet Vino Santo. Numerous wine bars in the old town serve these with small plates of cheese and ham, and grappa and other spirits are local products too.

The calendar adds its own flavours: food and wine events through the year, including A Tutto Nosiola and DiVin Ottobre, and the Christmas market, where wooden huts in Piazza Fiera sell local specialities from mid-November.