Aldeno

From the twelfth century until 1818 Aldeno belonged to the Comun Comunale, an administrative institution of the Vallagarina that existed in order to manage together the uncultivated lands and the woods of the associated comuni. It worked by statutes and by public assemblies, called Regole, which the heads of families attended. Seven villages belonged to it, and although the institution ended two centuries ago the rotation has survived as a feast: every year, between the end of May and the first days of June, the Comun Comunale is celebrated in one of the seven in turn. The village stands on the alluvial fan of the Arione stream, in a place that was an obligatory passage and a river port at once: the Adige made a wide bend here against the mountain, and a street in Aldeno is still called via del porto, harbour street.

About the name there is no agreement: some derive it from the Latin Altinum, others from the Lombard Aldio, others again from the Etruscan Altena — from the thirteenth century onwards it is Aldenum. In the Great War Aldeno became the seat of an Austro-Hungarian army corps and took in the administrative and judicial offices of Rovereto and the refugees cleared out of the valleys that had ended up on the line of fire; in 1916 three irredentists passed through, Cesare Battisti, Fabio Filzi and Damiano Chiesa, who was identified right here, all of them later condemned to death by a military court in Trento. In the nineteenth century the last peasant emigration of any size took people of Aldeno to Bosnia, where land was being parcelled out for cultivation. Today, on the edge of the village, works one of the largest binderies in northern Italy: many books of the Palermo publisher Sellerio have been bound here.