The presence or the absence of the religious education in school programs is a particularly sensitive political and pedagogical issue, which can influence the whole curriculum and the social perception of schooling and religions in different ways. The comparison between Austrian and Italian systems in later 19^th and at the beginning of the 20^th century, as they came in touch after the Great War, could explain some matters of the nation building process.

In the report written for the Minister by the chief of the Italian New Provinces School Office Giovanni Ferretti in 1923, you can read that «the most serious and thorny among the popular schools programs was the one of the religious teaching» (p. 93).

It concerns with the different public role of religion in the Kingdom of Italy and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and with the different inner political debates. While Italy was a young State led by laical liberal elites, that had struggled against the Pope’s temporal power – from 1870 he declared himself as an Italian State prisoner -, on the other hand, the Hapsburg House used to imagine itself as successor of the Sacred Roman Empire. In 1877 Italy banned the religious teaching from higher schools completely, while in Austria it was compulsory for all the confessions. As in Austria the clergy owned a significant power in civic affairs too, in Italy it was roughly persecuted and deprived of valuables properties. The extension of the Italian law to the New Provinces provoked some political stress among those populations, that were largely devoted to the Holy See especially in the lowest classes. The popular protests against the decision to ban the religious practises and teaching in the schools of Trieste caused the Governor of Venezia Giulia Augusto Ciuffelli's demission in December 1919. The protests involved the Italian national catholic associations, the Popular Party, the bishops and had an international echo too, because of the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference and the reactions among German, Slovenian and Croatian minorities.

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