Senale-San Felice

In 1946 Senale-San Felice passed from Trento to Bolzano along with the whole upper val di Non, under the De Gasperi-Gruber agreement: it is one of the three German-speaking municipalities of the valley. In 1974 two American anthropologists, John Cole and Eric Wolf, compared it with Tret, the Italian-speaking village next door, in a book called The Hidden Frontier that has become a classic.

They looked at how inheritance was divided on either side of the language border, and found two different systems. The sanctuary of the Madonna del Bosco, on the road to the Palade pass, is recorded as early as 1184 as a convent with a hospice for pilgrims; inside, in a gilded niche above the altar, is the image of the Virgin, which goes back to the fifteenth century.