In the late 18th and early 19th century Trento was successively under the rule of France, Italy and Austria.

In 1799 Romagnosi was arrested in Innsbruck during fifteen months by the Austrians on account of his alleged sympathy with the French, but he was acquitted.

His most celebrated work is Introduzione allo studio del diritto pubblico universale (2 vols., Parma, 1805).

[2] It is sometimes assumed that he found a relationship between electricity and magnetism, about two decades before Hans Christian Ørsted's 1820 discovery of electromagnetism.

However, his experiments did not deal with electric currents, and only showed that an electrostatic charge from a voltaic pile could deflect a magnetic needle.