Guglielmo Oberdan

He was executed after a failed attempt to assassinate Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, becoming a martyr of the Italian unification movement.

[1] His mother was a Slovene woman from Šempas (Italian: Sambasso, German: Schönpass) in the County of Gorizia and Gradisca, while his father, Valentino Falcier, was a Venetian soldier in the Austrian army (though in the civil registers of Trieste he is indicated as a baker).

As he supported the idea of independence for all of the empire's national groups he resented the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary and therefore deserted from the Austro-Hungarian Army because he did not want to take part in military activities there.

In the Italian capital he adopted irredentist ideas, aiming at the annexation to Italy of the Italian-speaking lands still under Austro-Hungarian rule.

[citation needed] In the same year, Emperor Franz Joseph was planning a visit to Trieste as part of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Habsburg rule.

According to Salata, Oberdan's plan was to provide Italy with a martyr for the cause the irredent Trieste, with the assassination attempt as a means to obtain this.

[7] With the assassination attempt failed, and imprisonment preventing him from action, he resorted to accuse himself to fulfill his purpose, "perhaps he himself blessing destiny, which had determined that his martyrdom would remain purest and that the only blood to be shed would be his own".

The subsequent assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and the revival of irredentism that followed, harked back to Oberdan's earlier attempt.

[8] It was determined that the bomb was launched not from the sidewalk but from the window of a building (first floor of number 9 in the contrada of the Corso), out of which a young man with reddish beard and hat sulle ventitré was seen hurry away.

[8] A girl, stopped with a knife in Ljubljana, who was employed by a family living at number 9 of the contrada of the Corso, was later suspected.

[8] Still, Salata reports that a guard initially stated that he could claim "almost with certainty that the man who hurried away from that building on 2 August was Oberdan".

[12] In Florence, his name is inscribed in the Obelisk of the Fallen in the Wars of Independence in the square in front of Santa Maria Novella.

The Italian writer Enzo Bettiza also depicted Oberdan in his novel "The Ghost of Trieste", under the fictitious name of Stefano Nardenk (Narden).

It starred Alberto Collo as Oberdan and was directed by Emilio Ghione, who also played the role of the governor of Trieste.

However, on January 21, 1884, Svevo published a translation of Ivan Turgenev's story "The Worker and the Man with the White Hands", whose protagonist is sent to the gallows for a rebellious act on behalf of the oppressed; Svevo added the remark that "What is really moving is not the death of the man with the white hands, but his self-sacrifice on behalf of people who are unable to appreciate it."

Gatt-Rutner states that "Triestines could not miss the allusion to Oberdan, which clearly demonstrates the light in which [Svevo] viewed the matter".