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🔔 The Italian Almanac

September 5

Stories and curiosities for September 5, from the Italy of a thousand bell towers.

Impossible geography 📅 1946

Salorno, the gorge where the German-speaking world ends

At Salorno, in the province of Bolzano in Italy's far north, the Adige valley squeezes between Monte Alto and the Favogna plateau. Through this gorge runs the language border between the German-speaking and Italian-speaking areas, a line that took shape around 1600, hardened in the nineteenth century and ignores every political frontier. On 5 September 1946, on the margins of the Paris Peace Conference, Alcide De Gasperi and Austria's foreign minister Karl Gruber signed the agreement granting South Tyroleans schooling in their mother tongue and official use of German. That sheet of paper became Annex IV of the 1947 peace treaty.

📍 Discover Salorno

Today's tidbits

On the table today

Cles, the Alpine town that runs on apples

In Cles, the main town of the Val di Non in Trentino, northern Italy, the local economy is built on apples. The Mela Val di Non, a protected designation of origin (DOP) since 2003, comes in three varieties: Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and Renetta Canada, the latter introduced in the nineteenth century. Since 1989 the valley's cooperatives have been united in the Melinda consortium, some 5,200 growers in one of Europe's most productive fruit-growing areas. Nor is the fame new: apples from these mountains were already winning international awards at the Vienna World's Fair of 1873.

📍 Cles →
Place names

Ne: the Italian municipality whose name is two letters long

In the Graveglia valley, in the hills behind Genoa in Liguria, sits a municipality whose entire name is Ne. It shares the record for the shortest municipal name in Italy with Re, in Piedmont, and Vo', in the Veneto. Scholars trace the name to the Latin nemus, 'wood', and more precisely a grove planted by human hands, perhaps the olive groves that covered the valley in antiquity. And there is a final twist: no village called Ne actually exists. It is a scattered municipality, and the town hall stands in the hamlet of Conscenti.

📍 Ne →

🎉 Celebrations today in… 3

3 towns with a guide celebrate their patron saint on September 5

Other saints of the day 3

Tione di Trento · Trentino-South Tyrol Andrettasant'Antonio di Padova · Campania Colli al MetauroSanta Teresa di Calcutta · Marche