Abstract

The essay examines Alcide De Gasperi’s idea of autonomy, drawing inspiration from the role of borders in his personal, political and institutional life. Just as he didn’t understand borders as fractures but as places of conjunction, so he conceived autonomy not in a defensive or closed sense, but always as a condition of openness to relationships. Autonomy should be thus an instrument of peaceful coexistence, a practice of self-government in a permanent relation to other levels of governance, a way to achieve good governance, a laboratory of democracy. The work focuses first on the role of the frontiers in the experience of the special autonomy of Trentino/South Tyrol, and then broadens the analysis to the general system of the regional autonomy in Italy. In this context De Gasperi’s open approach leads to considering the need to go beyond other immaterial rather than physical borders, represented by the current trends to separateness, self-referential identity, self-sufficiency. Beyond these borders are respectively institutional integration, openness to society, solidarity.