Salata was born on 17 September 1876 in
Ossero (Osor), on the island of
Cres, which at the time was part of the
Austro-hungarian empire. His family wasn't hereditary aristocratic but nonetheless was well-to-do. In 1911 Salata married
Ilda Mizzan, from a
Pisino family. They had a daughter together, Maria, born in 1911. Salata toured Istria with
Gabriele D'Annunzio, who, years before she engaged to Salata, became acquainted with his future wife in Pisino, where she designed a tribute paid to the poet upon his entry in the Istrian town, As early as in his high school years, Salata risked to be expelled from all the schools of the empire because of his attempts to found a branch of the
Lega Nazionale in Ossero, which promoted the Italian language and culture in territories inhabited by Germans, Croatians and Slovenians, that is
Trentino and the
Adriatic coast. Salata endeavored to adapt the newly annexed territories to Italy, but also to preserve the positive aspects of the autonomy those territories had had under Austria. Because of this, he clashed with less liberal, prominent politicians. The latter opposed any concessions to the minority German speaking and Slavic speaking populations. Salata claims that Oberdan's mother, Gioseffa Maria Oberdank, had been “Italian for many generations" and thus "in the martyr’s veins there ran no mixed blood, but purely Italian blood, both from his mother’s and his father’s side."), to work on the creation of the
Istituto Italiano di Cultura, of which he became the director in 1935. In 1936 he became Italian ambassador to Austria. In this capacity he embarked on a ruinous policy of safeguarding Austria's autonomy and later independence from Germany. In order to support Italy's aggressive policies, he published
Il nodo di Gibuti: storia diplomatica su documenti inediti (1939),
Nizza fra Garibaldi e Cavour: un discorso non pronunciato e altri documenti inediti (in
Storia e politica internazionale, rassegna trimestrale) in 1940. In 1943 he was named President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate. Salata died in 1944 in Rome, a few months before the city was liberated by the Anglo-American troops. ==Works==