[Marco B]

Someone who knows more of the history of Sud Tirol (South Tyrol) should chime in here. There was/is something of a separatist movement in the area. My grandmother had an early 6x9 Durst enlarger that said "Durst, Bolzen, Tirol" on the nameplate and all the control markings were German only.Tim

Go to the Durst website, and you will notice there is German language as well. It is just a minority language group in Italy, concentrated in the far north (like Chinese or Spanish in US maybe?, although that is not so much regionally dispersed maybe). Often, border regions tend to be "diffuse", in the sense of mixed language...

And borders in Europe tended to be far more fluid than most people think nowadays looking at a modern map, and not just because of wars. Huge chunks of land swapped on a decades or even years basis, as strategic marriages and treaties between, and death among!, members of the nobility, monarchies, and republics were made.

The "The Hague municipal historic museum" runs an animation of the "Dutch" borders from something like the period of 1000 to 1900. I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw it. And I think the historians that had to make up this animation ended up with a severe headache even thinking about, and having to determine, what should be considered as a part of the Netherlands at a certain point in time...

The concept of a "state" with (more or less!) fixed borders is just a modern invention...

So it may well be some historical artefact, like part of the Habsburg monarchy.

Marco