Albiano

About two hundred and sixty million years ago great eruptions of acid magma formed a porphyry platform that runs from Lavis to Pinè, to Cavalese and to Ora, from Nova Ponente to Merano: it is the largest porphyry deposit in Europe, and Albiano stands on top of it. For centuries, though, the people of Albiano lived not on that but on the fields: vines, wheat, chestnuts, hay meadows and pasture, the subsistence farming of the mountains; and in the nineteenth century cholera, drought and a number of fires pushed many families to emigrate, above all to the Americas. The deposits were found while the provincial road from Gardolo to Lases was being built, in 1911, and from then on were worked ever more intensively. On monte Gaggio and monte Gorsa the open quarries appeared, turning out slabs, setts and kerbstones; and the emigration stopped. Today Albiano is among the chief European centres for the quarrying and working of this stone, and it draws labour in: first from the south of Italy, then from other parts of the world.

The mines, however, are much older than the quarries. Many scholars hold that men were digging here already in Roman times, and from the Middle Ages the working was also regulated: the sources name Trentino, an influential entrepreneur of the Calisio mines and a feudatory of the prince-bishop Federico Vanga, and his son Federico d'Albiano, who took an active part in compiling the oldest mining statute known, the Codice Vanghiano, drawn up in 1208: the first body of law in Europe on mines. The extraction of silver-bearing galena went on, with mixed fortunes, until 1500. The name too is Roman: the many finds bear out the reading of Albiano as the land of a group of families of the gens Albius, and the village stood near a shortcut of the via Claudia Augusta Altinate, much used when the main route along the floor of the Adige valley was impassable. Under fascism Albiano had the comune of Lona-Lases joined to it, and that comune broke away again only in 1952.