Valle Aurina

This is the northernmost strip of Italy. The valley proper begins at the narrows of Klapf, north of Campo Tures, and not at Brunico as is often said; it appears in the documents as early as 1048, as vallis quae dicitur Aurina. The coat of arms adopted in 1969 is an exact drawing of that geography: a green pale with a wavy silver line, which are the valley and the Aurino torrent, and rows of silver points on either side, which are the mountains. Wealth came from the copper found at the head of the valley, at Predoi, which brought its greatest growth in the sixteenth century; but the working is far older, because in a dig of 1864 a miner found a Celtic axe in a cave. Once the mine closed, in the later twentieth century, it was the women who kept the economy going with bobbin lace, and a school grew out of it.

The parish church of San Giovanni, the valley's spiritual centre, was built between 1783 and 1785 to a design by the Tyrolean Joseph Abenthung. But the crossing this valley remembers best is that of the summer of 1947: about five thousand displaced people, most of them Jews who had survived the Shoah, came through it on their way to the Mediterranean ports and on to Palestine. They arrived from central and eastern Europe at the Austrian border and came down into Italy over the Tauern pass; the route was found by Marko Feingold, an Austrian Jew who had survived Auschwitz, Neuengamme and Buchenwald, and it was the Brichah organisation that guided them. A closed valley, used as a door.