Castello-Molina di Fiemme

Between the seventeen and the eighteen hundreds Castello burned five times, and of each fire the cause is known: one started in a hatter's workshop, one from a lightning strike, one by an arsonist's hand, one because some boys were playing with firecrackers inside a hayloft. Higher up, on the hill of San Giorgio, there had been a castle, and that too burned — but it was the men of the place who burned it: in 1296 the arimanni of the county of Castello decided to set fire to it. Damaged, it went on serving all the same until the early thirteen hundreds, then it was pulled down by order of Otto of Austria, and where it stood a little church was built. The village, for that matter, has changed its name three times: first it was called San Giorgio like the castle, then the county of Castello by the will of the counts of Tyrol-Gorizia, and from 1777 Castello di Fiemme.

In 1214 Meinhard I formally set up the county of Castello and had it run by a committee, not by a feudatory: there was a Degano for the economic and administrative side and there were the beni di Regola, common property for residents only, while justice was in the hands of a vicar answerable to the counts of Tyrol. The county was dissolved in 1777 by a treaty between the prince-bishop of Trent and Maria Theresa of Austria, and the rights of regola stayed with the inhabitants. Molina grew later, around the seventeen hundreds, on some twenty Venetian sawmills and mills — that is where its name comes from — and the flood of 1966 swept nearly all of them away. Ten years earlier the dam had come: the lake of Stramentizzo, filled in 1956, and old Stramentizzo, which stood lower down, was abandoned. The comune took its double name in 1973.