Corvara in Badia

The name comes from the Latin corvus with the suffix -aria: the place of the crows. It is attested from 1296 in the forms Kurfaer, Curveire, Corfara, Corvera, and the crow has become one of the village's symbols; the other is the Sassongher, the peak above it, which ended up on the coat of arms adopted in 1969. The tail «in Badia» exists only in the official Italian name, probably to distinguish it from the Corvara in the province of Pescara; and between 1925 and 1938, after the union with Colfosco, the comune was called Ladinia. The two villages, for that matter, have quite distinct histories: Corvara is documented from 1292, Colfosco a century and a half earlier, from 1153; Corvara lay in the jurisdiction of Marebbe, Colfosco in that of Selva di Val Gardena, and was annexed to the Val Badia only in 1828. The oldest church is Santa Caterina, built in 1498 in late Gothic, with a polygonal apse with fan vaulting and wall paintings ranging from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.

Corvara is one of the comuni where the majority of the population has Ladin as its mother tongue: at the last census a little more than eighty-seven per cent, the highest share in the whole of Ladinia. The school tells it well: in the primary years, from the second, lessons in Ladin are two hours a week, while all the others are held half in Italian and half in German, and there is one weekly hour of «interlingua» in which all three languages are used together; the teachers must all be Ladin speakers. What changed the village's life, though, was the snow: in 1947 the first chairlift in Italy was finished and tested here, connecting the village to the Col Alto, and from there began the tourist industry that grew enormously in the seventies. Today Corvara is the largest and highest centre in the Val Badia, the Boè piste ends beside the houses and the Maratona dles Dolomites finishes here; and in 2023 one of the local hoteliers said in a documentary that by now there are too many tourists.