Spinone al Lago

Until a few decades ago the village was called Spinone dei castelli, Spinone of the castles, and on its coat of arms the strongholds are still there in red, the ones whose ruins lie scattered about the district; the rest of the design is the outline of Lake Endine, which the village looks out on. Somebody, though, got rid of the castles: the one in the centre was pulled down in the fifteenth century by a decree of the Republic of Venice ordering the demolition of every fortification in the valley. The oldest building left standing is the Romanesque church of San Pietro in Vincoli, of the eleventh century, enlarged three centuries later and full of sixteenth-century frescoes: it is a national monument.

Just outside the built-up area is the Valle del Tuf, where the water comes down off a spur of tufa and is rich in sulphur. About its healing virtues the municipality has never joked: from the end of the nineteenth century it reserved for its inhabitants the right to carry the water to the sick on a doctor's prescription, and to drink it free at the Fonte spinosa. Those waters once rushed down towards the Cherio and formed a marsh, which the Austrians drained around 1835; today the springs are also tapped for bottling. Since 1982, around the spring, the municipality and the Alpini have laid out a small park.