Castello Tesino

The Tesino basin was, for a while, a road. The via Claudia Augusta passed through it, because lower down there were marshes and perhaps a lake where the Brenta canal now runs; but around the year 800 the canal cleared, the traffic moved into the easier Valsugana and the Tesino was left aside. From that isolation came its character: it never belonged to the prince-bishopric of Trento, and until 1786 not even to its diocese but to that of Feltre; from the fifteenth century it was the house of Austria's and stayed tied to the county of Tyrol until the First World War, passing through a file of lordships without losing its administrative and economic independence. Since pasture and farming were not enough to live on, the men took to the road: they are the perteganti, itinerant traders who until almost the twentieth century went all over Europe. At first they sold flints for arquebuses, cut from the flint stone that abounds here; then, when firearms stopped using flint, they changed their goods and sold prints.

The two wars marked everything. In the first the men were called up by the Austro-Hungarian empire and sent to the far eastern front, while the village was almost completely destroyed by shelling; those who had stayed were evacuated, some northwards and some into the Kingdom of Italy, a few as far as Sicily. Veterans and evacuees came back and rebuilt the village, shortly before the second broke out. From the eighth of September 1943 to May 1945 the Resistance here was organised in the Gherlenda battalion of the Garibaldi brigade Antonio Gramsci, and two gold medals for military valour were given to two very young women partisans of these mountains: Ancilla Marighetto, «Ora», and Clorinda Menguzzato, «Veglia». Today the village lives on summer and winter tourism, on stock-raising and on soft fruit, and the population is slowly falling. Around it are the Cima d'Asta, the highest of its group, the gorge of the Grigno, the dry valley of the Rodena and the cave that looks out over the Senaiga.