Canal San Bovo

The Rio Rebrùt has twice given this valley a lake. In 1823 a landslide made a small one, which lasted a short while; two years later, in 1825, a bigger landslide dammed the Vanoi torrent and formed the Lago Nuovo. In 1826 the natural embankment gave way a first time, and the water destroyed the hamlets of Ponte and Remesori, killing fifty-two people. The lake stayed until 1882, fifty-seven years in all, when after many floods the embankment gave way altogether and the lake emptied and vanished. What is left of it is a painting: a partly ruined fresco on an old house along the road from Canal San Bovo to Caoria, which was once the Osteria al Lago.

In this valley, over the centuries, peoples speaking Romance, German and Slavic languages mixed together — most probably Slovenes and Czechs — and the surnames of the inhabitants still say so: from the Tyrol, from Vorarlberg and from Bohemia they came up here as miners. Two things they left: a fresco of 1585 at Caoria in which, behind the Crucifixion, a city-castle is painted with the word Praga written on it; and the patron of Caoria, San Giovanni Nepomuceno, who is the patron of Bohemia as well. The name of the comune, too, changed saint along the way: the oldest attestations are Canaliis Sambuci and Canal Sambugo, where canal means valley and the rest points to the elder tree, hence the valley of the elder; but already in 1481 a document writes de Canali sancti Boui, and from the seventeenth century the form Canal San Bovo settles in. San Bovo, co-patron since ancient times, is in the church of San Bartolomeo in wooden statues and canvases of the late sixteenth century; and the civic seal of 1785 carries an otter, the historic symbol of the Primiero, between two palm fronds that allude to him.