Cavedine

In the wood above Cavedine there is a path that in a few hundred metres crosses five thousand years. You come upon the Roman fountain, so called because it stands on an ancient route linking Tridentum to the Benacus, that is Trento to Garda. A little further on is the Cosina, a burial cave used in the Copper and the Bronze Age. Then you reach the Carega del diaol, the devil's chair: it is a Roman funerary stone of the first century, and the name was given it by people who could not read it and preferred to explain it that way. There are the hands, rock carvings of religious character that nobody has managed to date with certainty. And there is the Capitel dei Mericani, the shrine of the Americans, the ex voto left by those who set out for the Americas: the most recent station on the path and, together with the hands, the least datable.

In the First World War the Italian-Austrian front passed through here, and the population risked deportation. It did not happen, and in thanksgiving a sanctuary to the Madonna was built above the town hall: a building raised not for a grace received but for a misfortune avoided. A little further back in time, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, other votive shrines had been put up after the epidemics that decimated the village, and one of them is still called the plague shrine; the one of the Pietà is of 1836. On the coat of arms, approved in 1989, there are five ears of corn: one for the seat and one for each hamlet. The valley, besides its own name, has a second one that is a description: Val del Vent, the valley of the wind.