Campodenno

In front of the church of Saints Maurice and Companions, on the war memorial, there are bombs that did not go off. They come from an American bomber, a B-26 Marauder that had taken off from Corsica and which in November 1944 — during the Allied raids against the Brenner axis — was hit by German anti-aircraft fire and came down just above the village, at the locality of Faé-Grum; the crew jumped by parachute and were caught by the occupying forces. The bombs were recovered and set there. Inside the church there is instead a painting by Domenico Udine Nani, on the right side altar, and it recalls another disaster narrowly missed: the cholera epidemic of 1836, from which Campodenno was spared.

The name means field of Denno, and it is a common formation in the Val di Non; probably the village belonged to the parish of Denno, or else the name comes from the de Enno family, which had property here. The first mention is of 1276, and it concerns one of them precisely: the nobleman Oldarico de Enno made over to the bishop of Trento his serf Bontempo della Palma with all his heirs. In the centuries that followed the village gave itself a form of self-government, the regola: all the heads of hearth, that is, the fathers of families, met in assembly, and each year they took turns in the office of regolano; then there were the jurors, elected by the community, and the saltari, who had to watch over fields, woods and meadows and to call the neighbours together when needed. In 1525, when the peasants of the Val di Non rose against prince-bishop Bernardo Clesio, Campodenno stayed prudent: nearby Sporminore and Spormaggiore were instead harshly punished. In the church of Segonzone the frescoes of 1473 by the Baschenis brothers can still be seen.