Abstract

After seventeen years of exile in France, Silvio Trentin returns to Italy at the end of August 1943 and immediately puts himself at the helm of the Partito d'azione veneto (The Party for Action of Veneto) and the local Comitato di liberazione nazionale (The National Liberation Committee). In the months preceding his death, which occurred in March of 1944, he was able to reorganize the local resistance against the fascist and national socialist forces and to express his own political thought with several significant works summing up his legal training and giving voice to both federalist and socialist ideals. Among these documents, there is a particularly important draft on the hopeful constitutional outline of the Italian Republic which draws inspiration from a previous note on the French Republic. This draft can be considered his political testament: a testament that seems to implicitly express a utopian conception of the legal order.