Attilio Hortis was an important cultural and political figure in Trieste at the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essay analyzes his speech, read in
the Parliament of Vienna, in 1902: a speech with which Hortis advocated the cause of the establishment of an Italian university in Trieste. In particular, in the geopolitical context of the time, Hortis’s idea of placing legal and linguistic studies at the center of university teaching is examined, as they are regarded as the most functional to the development needs of the most important port of the Habsburg Empire and of the connected economy.
