Considered with Cavour as the greatest statesman of the united Italy, Alcide De Gasperi has been the focus of a renewed interest in historiography in recent years. This well documented essay deals with the period of youth and the first steps that the De Gasperi politician moved under the Hapsburg Empire. With passionate precision, Pombeni reconstructs all the stages of De Gasperi's apprenticeship, the experience as university student in Vienna at the end of the century, where he came into contact with many cultural and social ferments, the direction of the Catholic newspaper of Trento, the election at the Parliament of the Empire in 1911. Based on a meticulous original research, the book enlights the most controversial and least known part of the life of the great politician, representing at the same time a journey into the mechanisms of the building of a political leadership and the harshness of an historical period in which nationalisms, cultural and religious identities and declining political systems of the old regime clashed.