Bieno

Bieno stands at 810 metres on a morainic step at the entrance to the Tesino plateau, and for the view from up there they call it the little balcony of the Valsugana. It is a village of stonecutters: they quarried granite from the nearby Rava pits, and its history is bound up with that of the Tesino pedlars. The via Claudia Augusta Altinate runs through, a little above today's road, and since the Romans often followed prehistoric tracks the settlement is thought to be older than they are. The name, for that matter, is pre-Latin and nobody knows what it means: it appears as Bleni in 1241, and in the fifteenth century it is written Blen and Plen.

That document of 1241 came out of a dispute with the neighbouring comune of Pieve, and that is why we know the name of Bieno's mayor at the time, Giovanni Schenono; from a second quarrel, in a parchment of 1285, comes the name of his successor, Michele Dalrio. The village had its own Carta di Regola, the rules the heads of households set themselves for the use of woods, pastures, mountain dairies and roads. In 1928 Bieno was attached to Pieve Tesino, and it became a comune again in 1947. The parish church of San Biagio has one peculiarity: of all the villages of the old pievado of Strigno, Bieno is the only one whose parish church is still the ancient one.