Salorno

Here the Adige valley narrows into the Chiusa di Salorno, which for the last two centuries has been the symbolic barrier between the German-speaking and the Italian-speaking parts of historic Tyrol. Salorno is one of the six comuni in the province with an Italian-speaking majority, and its particularity is that these are largely not descendants of the migrations organised by Italian governments between the wars, but families of Trentino origin who have lived here for centuries: in the census of 1921, two years after annexation, the population still declared itself German-speaking in the majority. The name is attested as Salurnis in the eighth century and probably comes from a pre-Roman root meaning marsh; another theory reads it as Solis Urnae, the urn of the sun, and is supported by the fact that in winter the sun is hardly ever seen here. Above the village there is a waterfall that now carries water only after heavy rain: during works in the stream bed a watertight layer of ground was removed by mistake.

In 1403 a Weistum, the statute of the regola, set down in writing the rights of the community towards Habsburg power, and it was written entirely in German. Under Fascism the comune was moved, with the whole Bassa Atesina, into the province of Trento to make Italianisation easier: the public use of German and its teaching were forbidden, and the German-speaking minority answered with clandestine classes, the Katakombenschulen; Josef Noldin, from Salorno, was among the main organisers and was deported to Lipari for it. In 1948 the comune passed to the province of Bolzano. Until 2019 it was called simply Salorno; then a regional law added on the Wine Road. Above the narrows stands the castle, which the counts of Eppan lost for having had two cardinals attacked on their way to the emperor's court, and which is also the setting of one of the sagas collected by the Brothers Grimm.