Under the Cisalpine Republic a district of Alto Adige was created as a part of the short-lived "Department of Benaco". The District of Alto Adige included some municipalities of today's province of Verona. The Department of Benaco, which was created in 1797, was disbanded in 1798 and with it the District of Alto Adige after a structural reorganization of the Napoleon's Italian republic.
Kingdom of Italy
After the partition of the County of Tyrol between Bavaria and the Kingdom of Italy on 9 June 1810 by Napoleon Bonaparte, the new department of Alto Adige was created. It comprised parts of today's province of Alto Adige/South Tyrol, the largest part of today's province of Trentino and some communes in the provinces of Vicenza and Brescia. Its capital was Trent and the administrative language Italian, but the German-speaking areas temporarily adopted bilingualism in the public notices and used German in city government. The department was known in German as "Ober-Etsch". The department included the area around Bolzano, that had a population mostly romance speaking while the other areas of the former South Tyrol were left united to Bavaria because mostly German speaking. The department was disbanded after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. Its territory was divided over the actual Italian autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano/Bozen.
Reuse of name
The name Alto Adige had no historical antecedent about the region it denoted, but merely described the geographic area of the upper reaches of the Adige river. This was something that was commonly done during the Napoleonic period when naming departments, ignoring any historical names or connotations but using geographical references. The name was dropped after the end of the Napoleonic period, but was used by the Italian irredentists in the mid 1800s. The term "Alto Adige" was later used as the Italian name of the province of Bolzano by the fascist Ettore Tolomei in his Italianization campaign. He used the words "Alto Adige" as a historical connection to the Napoleon's geopolitical transformation of the Italian peninsula. In 1918 what was used to be officially called "southern Tyrol" was united after the end of World War I to Italy; but the term "Alto Adige" was applied instead of the Austrian-proposed "Italian Tyrol" or "Tridentine Tyrol". "Alto Adige" was made official by the fascist regime in 1923.
