Ono San Pietro

The town sits on the alluvial fan that the Ble torrent has built by carving into the Concarena, and on ground like that karst works fast: there are dolines, which in the Camunian dialect they call bìs, and frequent landslips. At the beginning of the fifteenth century a landslide broke away from the Concarena and came down precisely on the nucleus of Cricolo, cutting it down for good; the damage to the fields was such that many had to emigrate. Ono was famous for its calchere, the lime kilns — six have been found, in use until the nineteen-fifties — and for the quarries of occhiadino marble, so much so that the nickname by which the Camunians call its people is Calcheròcc, the lime-burners. A smelting furnace opened in 1338 stayed in use until 1815, that is for almost five hundred years. The name of the town, which in dialect is Dò, has three explanations: the letters D and O on the façade of the old church of Saints Peter and Paul, the Celtic duno, a pen for wool sheep, or the Latin dunum, a terrace.

Its recent history, however, is a history of dignity. In 1927, with the fascist law against small comuni, Ono San Pietro lost its autonomy and became a hamlet of Capo di Ponte. In 1946, at the first free local elections after the war, the inhabitants abstained from voting to protest against the autonomy that had not been given back; and in August 1947, having become independent again, a large group of citizens walked into the town hall of Capo di Ponte, took back the flag, the registers and the fittings and carried them in procession all the way to Ono San Pietro. The parish church of Sant'Alessandro was rebuilt between 1798 and 1809 over the fifteenth-century building, and in the presbytery a Madonna and Child by Palma il Giovane is kept; the little church of San Pietro in Cricolo, of the fifteenth century, stands on a panoramic knoll and has a sixteenth-century bell tower with four mullioned windows. Since 2014 the comune has been twinned with Monongahela, in Pennsylvania.