Sarentino

Sarentino, Sarntal in German, has 6,890 inhabitants and is the largest comune by area in the whole of Trentino-Alto Adige: 28 hamlets scattered through a valley closed in by 140 peaks. Isolation has preserved crafts that have vanished elsewhere, beginning with embroidery on leather done with the quills of peacock tail feathers, and then the carved farmers' pipes, the hand weaving, the Sarner, the hand-sewn woollen jacket known throughout the historic Tyrol. A road towards Bolzano was built on the orders of the emperor Maximilian I in 1494, and it was replaced only in the nineteen thirties by a new one with 21 tunnels, which landslides still often close.

Two things can be told about the church of Sarentino. The first is that the parish has belonged to the Teutonic Order without interruption from the Middle Ages to the present day. The second is that one of its prebendary parish priests was Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, who drew its revenues and never once set foot in the village. Then there is winter: on the Thursdays of Advent the Klöckeln come back, men masked in sheepskins, wooden clogs and broad-brimmed felt hats, who go through the villages striking bells to drive off the evil spirits. It is a pagan Germanic rite for the fertility of the fields, and among the characters there is also a woman, the Zussl, who by tradition is played by a man.