Canazei

Canazei stands at the northern end of the Val di Fassa, where the province of Trento meets those of Bolzano and Belluno, and its recent history is a lesson in how comuni are made and unmade in these valleys. In 1926 it took in the territories of the comune of Campitello, which had been suppressed; in 1956 those territories were detached again, to reconstitute the comune under the name of Campitello di Fassa; and in 1999 Canazei took back from that comune a piece of land on which nobody lived. Here the language is Ladin: at the census of 2001 more than eight people out of ten declared it as their mother tongue, and the speech is the cazèt variety of the Fassa dialect. The arms the comune adopted in 1992 are an allegory of the place made with the Ladin colours: green below for the meadows and the woods, white above, bounded by the outline of the peaks, for the snows and the glaciers, and blue for the sky. The name comes from the Latin cannicetus, a cane thicket.

The oldest things standing in the comune are two small churches: San Floriano, in the middle of the village, built in 1592, and the Madonna della Neve at Gries, of 1595, which has an onion-domed bell tower and, on its southern wall, a Saint Christopher painted in the seventeen hundreds. All the rest is mountain and what people do on it. Canazei is on the Sellaronda, the ski circuit round the Sella group; it has three times been the finish of a stage of the Giro d'Italia; and with Bolzano and Milan it hosted the world ice hockey championships. But the thing that says most about this place is a race that climbs the mountains behind the village, the Dolomites Skyrace: it starts from the square, climbs to the Passo Pordoi, then to the Sass Pordoi, culminates on the Piz Boè and comes back down the Val Lasties — twenty-two kilometres and more than sixteen hundred metres of ascent. The rules give the runners one hour and five minutes to get from the square to the pass, and four hours and a quarter for the whole course; anyone arriving later is out.