[10] Nonetheless, he and his movement had only marginal contacts with the Slovene neighbours, as Pittoni resented Slovenian nationalism and opposed the Slavic claims over Trieste (or "urban Slavism").

That year, he helped the senior socialist leader Carlo Ucekar in directing the Österreichischer Lloyd stokers strike, but lost control of it to anarchist agitators.

[4][14][15] With Pittoni at the helm, the Triestine socialists moved closer to the Austromarxist centre,[4][14][16] holding the 1905 anti-war and anti-irredentist demonstration which coincided with the official launch of SMS Erzherzog Ferdinand Max.

[17][18] Although this was a major victory for his version of socialism, Pittoni noted that his League lacked cadres, and reached out to members of Italian Socialist Party (PSI), in the Kingdom of Italy, proposing that they should relocate their militancy to Trieste.

As he noted in a parliamentary address of October 10, 1908: "it can no longer be indifferent to the nations of Austria if the disenfranchised peoples and classes of Hungary still fail to receive the rights we owe them.

Chief editor of the party organ, Il Lavoratore, and a key figure in the Social Studies Circle, Pittoni also founded the Workers Cooperative of Trieste, Istria and Friulia.

[1][29] His participation in such causes increased the cultural and educational prestige of socialism, solving many of the movement's teething problems, and helping to spread the cooperative ideals among the Slovene population.

[11] As leader of the Italian parliamentary club,[1][4] Pittoni supported an inquiry into the affairs of Transleithania, where, according to fellow deputy George Grigorovici, the Hungarian Post was censoring the correspondence of left-wing opponents, including Austrian subjects.

[34] In 1914, just before the start of World War I, Pittoni began cooperating with the Yugoslav Social-Democratic Party (JSDS), which had recently relocated in Trieste, and set up a shared bureau to oversee common operations.

[40] Probably as a result of this nonconformism, Pittoni was again conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to the front, before returning to Trieste as cooperative leader, working to ensure the city's supply in food and basic goods.

[43] At odds with Adler, who supported continuing the war, he moved closer to Karl Renner's faction, which stood by the old confederation programme, but he also issued messages of sympathy toward the revolutionary, Bolshevik and "maximalist", groups.

[49] In late 1918, as the Slovene National Council prepared to assume control of the region, he publicized the manifesto of Emperor Charles, which proposed an Austrian confederation and a special role for Trieste.

[50] However, he faced increased opposition within the Trieste socialist movement from the Giuseppe Tuntar–Ivan Regent faction (which favoured an Italo-Slavic Soviet Republic)[47] and from irredentist or "socialist-nationalists" such as Edmondo Puecher, who had organised the strike of January 1918.

[8] In October 1918, during the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, the Imperial Council's Italian club dissolved: a "national fascio" was formed, unilaterally proclaiming the annexation of Istria and South Tyrol by the Kingdom of Italy.

[52] Although stranded in Vienna, he communicated with his Triestine faction: his second-in-command, Alfredo Callini, was a member of the Committee of Public Safety, formed after Governor Alfred von Fries-Skene abandoned Trieste.

[55] The city was soon placed under the governorship of Carlo Petitti di Roreto, who tried to talk Pittoni into accepting the national unification and the Trieste Social Democratic League's integration with the PSI.

[1][62] He campaigned for the unification of Italian cooperatives into "a few hundred powerful organisms", which, as he explained in a February 1922 article for La Cooperazione Siciliana, were to form the basis of "a new society".

[64] Such activities irritated Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, who repeatedly urged the Austrian Christian Social Party to liquidate the Viennese socialist "canker".

[1][4] The funeral oration was given by SDAPÖ colleague Wilhelm Ellenbogen, who called Pittoni's fight against irredentism "one of the most glorious actions in the history of Austria's workers movement", and praised his "intimate affinity with the Austro-German thought and sentiment".

[70] As argued by researcher Gilbert Bosetti, Pittoni's death "put an end to all hopes of a reform-minded Triestine socialism that supported peace among peoples.