The Constitution represents the cornerstone of the institutional building and of the set of essential principles that sustain our country. As such, it constitutes the key to enter the framework of the Italian legal system and it serves as an indispensable reference tool for consciously questioning everything that surrounds us, as well as the increasingly complex developments of the society in which we live.
These are the primary reasons why the Faculty of Law of the University of Trento bestows this text on its first-year students: because the Constitution is, at the same time, the first and the highest step in legal literacy, considering that it functions both as a receptacle for the basic lexicon of citizenship and as locus for a refined synthesis of a variety of technical languages and knowledge; ultimately, also because the Constitution is an essential compass for practicing interpretation and argumentation, and by the same token, for understanding the importance, dynamism and transversal nature of the legal phenomenon.
Furthermore, the reader will not miss to note that the version of the constitutional text proposed here is bilingual (Italian-English). The predominant reason for such long-standing choice is rooted in the genetic code of the Faculty of Law in Trento, which revolves around the thoroughness of legal comparison and of the projection of law on a European, transnational and international scale. 
This small edition of the Constitution has become, over time, a fundamental tool in terms of the many relationships that the Faculty of Law has been able to build. It has also come to be the opportunity to renew an important methodological approach, as well as to relaunch the public and fruitful role of the community of jurists in Trentino.
Paolo Carta
Dean of the Faculty of Law