Curon Venosta

In 1950 the old village of Curon went under water: the two small alpine lakes of Curon and Resia were joined into a single reservoir behind a dam, and everything that stood there was razed. Everything but one thing. On the twenty-third of July, when the village was mined to be demolished, the bell tower of the church of Santa Caterina did not fall, and it was declared a historic monument. The new village was rebuilt on the eastern side of the valley and the people were obliged to move into it. The tower is still there, out in the water, and in winter, when the lake freezes, you can walk to it. They say that on certain winter days the bells can still be heard ringing: the bells were taken down on the eighteenth of July, before the water came. In 2009 the level of the lake was lowered with temporary embankments in order to repair the submerged parts, cracked by seepage and frost, and the roof was redone for the first time in more than a century.

The name is Rhaeto-Romance, from curuna, a crag, and in 1147 it is written Curun apud lacum, Curon by the lake: the address was already that. The Romans arrived fifteen years before Christ and built across the Resia pass the via Claudia Augusta, which the Middle Ages called the upper way or the road of Swabia; from the fifth century the first evangelisers came up from the Adige valley and from Chur, and from the end of the Middle Ages the valley was settled by German-speaking people, who today are nearly everybody. In the twelfth century a man from Burgusio founded at Muta a hospice for pilgrims and carters with a chapel, and around it San Valentino alla Muta grew up; in 1326 the fishermen of San Valentino were obliged to send their fish to the charterhouse of Senales. The Resia pass became a state border in 1919. And in 1951, a year after the water, a bus with twenty-three people aboard went off the road and ended in the lake: one person was saved.