PRATO (at Prato), GIOVANNI. — Priest and journalist, b. at Rovereto on 29 Oct. 1812, d. there on 13 June 1883. Ordained priest in 1835, in 1842 he took up the teaching of religion at the Rovereto Seminary, of which city he was elected representative to the Diet of Frankfurt in the spring of 1848. At Frankfurt first and then at Vienna, in the Austrian Parliament where he served for many years as deputy, he consistently advocated the withdrawal of his native region from the German Confederation and the administrative autonomy of the Tyrol.
His parliamentary activity came to an end in 1875, when the Bishop of Trent suspended him a divinis for having given his favourable vote to the so-called “confessional laws” — which undermined the rights of the Church — proposed by the Austrian Liberal Party in the Chamber, and the Liberal-National Political Society of Trent expelled him from its ranks for having, in deference to his bishop, retracted his vote. He then resigned his parliamentary mandate and also abandoned his intense journalistic activity. He had indeed founded Il Giornale del Trentino and subsequently Il Giornale di Rovereto, Il Trentino and Il nuovo giornale del Trentino, always agitating for the Italian character of his region: a cause he also debated widely in numerous Italian periodicals, especially in Il Crepuscolo. He also found time for numerous scholarly and literary writings: he published a well-received Studio sullo stato di coltura del Trentino, promoted the celebrations in Trent for the sixth centenary of the birth of Alighieri, and translated Il processo di Galileo by Gebler.