Bedollo

On the arms of Bedollo there is a birch — bedol, in dialect, is precisely the birch — and above it three pine cones, recalling that the village belonged to the Magnifica Comunità di Piné. But the longest story of this upland is that of a language. From the thirteenth century the area was reached by the immigration of Bavarian-Tyrolean settlers, favoured by prince-bishop Federico Vanga and by the captains of Castel Pergine, and in a document of the Regola of 30 November 1262 the first German names already appear, among them one Oswaldo de Bedolo. Between Bedollo, Brusago and Regnana seventy-four farmsteads were raised: there were land-clearing peasants and miners, the canopi. In 1299 the Bavarian-Tyrolean population built the church and named it after Saint Oswald, a saint much venerated in Tyrol.

That speech lasted for centuries. In the sixteenth century Innocenzo a Prato wrote that the people of Piné spoke a Germanic tongue corrupted with Italian; a century later Michelangelo Mariani said that in the valley a strange German dialect was still spoken; and the language held out until the early years of the nineteenth century. What made it retreat was the arrival, around the sixteenth century, of Lombard peasants, who created a mixed-language community: they lived together peacefully, but from there the decline began. Today what remain are the place names — Piazze was Placzhoff, the farmstead of Svaldi was the Oswaldhof — some surnames and a good many words in the Piné dialect: stoll for the tunnel, smolz for lard, kromer for the pedlar, kraiz for the cross, snell for quick, zeruck for back. Even the nickname of the people of Bedollo, soffeni, comes from there.