PRATO (a Prato), GIOVANNI. — Priest and journalist, born in Rovereto on 29 October 1812, died there on 13 June 1883. Ordained a priest in 1835, in 1842 he assumed the teaching of religion at the Seminary of Rovereto, the city for which he was elected representative to the Frankfurt Diet in the spring of 1848. At Frankfurt first and then in Vienna, in the Austrian Parliament, of which he was a deputy for many years, he consistently advocated the withdrawal of his native region from the German Confederation and the administrative autonomy of Tyrol.
His parliamentary activity came to an end in 1875, when the bishop of Trento suspended him a divinis because he had voted in favour of the so-called «confessional laws»—subversive of the rights of the Church—which the Austrian Liberal Party had proposed to the Chamber, and the Liberal-National Political Society of Trentino expelled him from its ranks because, in obedience to his bishop, he had retracted his vote. He then resigned his parliamentary mandate and also abandoned his intense journalistic activity. Indeed, he had founded Il Giornale del Trentino and subsequently Il Giornale di Rovereto, Il Trentino and Il nuovo giornale del Trentino, in which he consistently championed the cause of the Italian character of his region: a subject he also extensively discussed in numerous Italian periodicals, especially in Crepuscolo. He likewise found the time and energy for numerous works of erudition and varied literature: he published an esteemed Studio sullo stato di cultura del Trentino, promoted the celebrations in Trento for the sixth centenary of Alighieri’s birth, and translated Il processo di Galileo by Geblers.