The paper will consider the transition of Istria and South Tyrol from the Austrian-Hungarian empire to Italy after the Great War. Particularly it will regard some districts in which Italians were in minority: the German cisalpine Tyrol and the Croatian inner and Eastern Istria. It is surprising to discover that in the two regions the implantation of Italian elementary schools followed two different and manifestly contradictory paths, due to the different identities of the Italian minorities.

As in South Tyrol Italians were usually poor peasants subjected to German owners, in Istria they were on average richer as Croats and concentrated in urban centres, while Croats were in great part farmers. The two regions presented some almost symmetrical ethnical and economical situations.

In 1921 the minister of Education Corbino promulgated a law, which obliged Italian parents to enrol their children to new Italian elementary schools, forbidding at the same time the registration to other languages institutes. The reason was that the Italian peasants in South Tyrol preferred German schools, because considered better and more useful in everyday life and for work. At the same time in Istria Slovenes and Croats were encouraged – also through arbitrary and violent acts - to enrol their children to Italian schools, even, somewhere, against their will.

The compulsory attending of Italian schools by peasants who, even they had Italian names and used to speak Italian at home, used to percept themselves as Germans, was a clear contradiction of the traditional Italian national identity, conceived on the French voluntary model. While in Istria had to prevail also among Slavs the role of the Italian culture and language, in South Tyrol the nationality was established on the basis of Blut und Boden values.

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