Selva di Val Gardena

This village has two names and they come from two different things. The Ladin one, Sëlva, is attested in the twelfth century as Silva and comes from the Latin silva, the wood; the German one, Wolkenstein, appears in the thirteenth century and comes from the castle and from the family that held it. The castle was bought in 1293 by Randolf von Villanders, the founder of the von Wolkenstein, and with it the jurisdiction over seven of the surrounding farms. It did not fall in a war: about 1525 boulders came away from the rock walls behind it and destroyed part of it, and nobody rebuilt it. What is left is a stretch of wall and a courtyard with porphyry columns, at the mouth of the Vallunga. The poet and composer Oswald von Wolkenstein was born in 1377, but where exactly is not known: perhaps at the Trostburg, perhaps at Falzes, in the Val Pusteria.

The rest was decided by the mountains. In 1869 a Viennese, Paul Grohmann, made the first ascent of the Sassolungo. A few years later, after days of torrential rain, a great landslide destroyed two hay barns and a farm and killed six people. The railway that joined the valley to Chiusa was built between 1915 and 1916 by Russian prisoners of war, and it was closed a few decades later; the carriage roads over the Gardena and Sella passes are of the same years. The parish church has its oldest part in the sacristy, because that was the votive chapel of the early sixteenth century, dedicated to Our Lady in the Wood, around which everything else was built afterwards. And then there are the numbers of the tourist trade: from about half a million presences at the end of the sixties to a million at the end of the eighties — and two out of five of them, still today, are in summer.