Cerveno

In 1752 a parish priest of Cerveno commissioned a Way of the Cross from a sculptor of the valley, Beniamino Simoni: fourteen stations with a hundred and ninety-eight life-size figures, carved in wood and stucco and painted. But Simoni quarrelled continually with the parishioners and the villagers, and in the end he was dismissed; the work passed to Donato and Grazioso Fantoni, who completed three stations, the eighth, the ninth and the tenth. The sanctuary belongs to the cycle of the Sacred Mounts and stands beside the parish church. Every ten years the people of the village stage the Santa Crus, the living representation of the Passion: the village museum keeps the costumes of the performers, the weapons, the armour and the pictures of the preparations, which take up the whole community. And one of the traditional nicknames of the people of Cerveno, of the kind the Camunian dialects call scütüm, is brusa crus, cross-burners.

The vicinia of Cerveno — the assembly of those holding ancient rights in the community — owned twenty-one square kilometres, mostly pasture and rock, and it owned a smelting furnace. The councils of the vicini followed the cycles of farming, but could be summoned extraordinarily, as in mining villages, for the maintenance and the starting-up of the furnaces; and one of the oldest documents in the whole valley attesting that the vicinie ran an industry collectively is precisely the founding charter of the furnace of Cerveno, of 1429. The village calendar had its rough sides too. On the first of January, the evening of the crossings, the roads were made impassable with bundles of sticks, the doors of the houses were tied from outside so that they would not open, and the clothes taken from the girls were hung out in the open. On the first of March the young men went in the evening to stand outside the stables, where people gathered, and in disguise jokingly proclaimed absurd marriages — and again the girls' clothes ended up on show the next morning, in places where everyone could see them. In 1610 a Venetian official passing through noted that the wines of Cerveno were not much good.