Vione

The name has changed shape — Vionno in the eleventh century, Avionno in the twelfth, Viono in the thirteenth — and the explanations are several: from via, which in the local speech becomes Viù, the big road; from the nearby Val d'Avio; from an old Celtic word for a mountain hut. A seventeenth-century chronicler tells instead that the place was called Polagra and that it was Charlemagne who, having stormed its fortress, renamed it after his own castle of Vion in the Pyrenees — but those Camunian adventures of Charlemagne were written down precisely in the seventeenth century. What is documented is harder: in 1338 Vione and Vezza quarrelled over their boundaries, the inhabitants took up arms and the men of Vezza set fire to the castle of Vione; the peace, which also settled the boundaries of Promina and Valzani, was drawn up the year after.

In 1460 schools of Latin grammar were founded here, attended not only by the villagers but by outsiders, and they lasted until 1705. In four centuries this place of a few hundred souls gave a hundred and forty-two priests, ninety-nine monks, seventy-six public notaries and several doctors of theology, law and medicine: they called it a seedbed of notaries. Above the houses, at more than two thousand two hundred metres, stands Tor dei Pagà, a military installation of the thirteenth or fourteenth century built beside a protohistoric ritual area. In the old elementary school there is now an ethnographic museum, put together by a village schoolmaster who was also a dialect poet: twelve rooms and some six thousand objects of mountain farming life. And once a year, by custom, the people of Vione distributed salt.