Ala has 8,887 inhabitants at the far south of Trentino, at the mouth of the Valle dei Ronchi, and it is one of the five Italian comuni whose name reads the same in both directions, together with Ateleta, Onano, Orero and Siris. Until the First World War it was the border station between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Its fortune, though, had come much earlier and was called velvet: mulberry and silkworms arrived here in the days of Venetian rule, a century later the town went over to making silk velvet for the European market, and that wealth is still what you walk through, in the fabric of seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses. Ala has held the title of city since the sixteenth century.
From here comes also a woman who crossed three centuries. Venere Pizzinato was born at Ala in 1896, when the town was still Austrian, and died at Verona in 2011 at the age of 114: she was the oldest woman in Italy and in Europe, and one of the last people in the world born in the nineteenth century. In between there had been a whole life: the racial laws that forced her and her husband Isidoro Papo, a Jew, to flee to Nice, where they married, and the night in 1969 when she stayed awake until dawn to watch the moon landing on television.
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📅 Every year, on 14 February
Ala celebrates Saint Valentine on 14 February; the other patron, Our Lady of the Assumption, is celebrated on 15 August.
📅 Every year, on 15 August
Ala celebrates Our Lady of the Assumption on 15 August; the other patron, Saint Valentine, is celebrated on 14 February.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Ala, but an easy day trip away.
