Folgaria

In 1222 Folgaria appears among the first in Trentino as a community of free people governed by its own administrative bodies; in 1315 it gave itself a statute, the Carta Ordinamentorum, and in the fifteenth century, to escape the feudal jurisdiction of the Castelbarco of Beseno, it «granted itself» to the Republic of Venice, which guaranteed it total and perpetual autonomy. When Venetian rule fell in 1510, the Trapp family tried to reimpose the old dependence, and the lawsuit that followed — the causa Trappia — lasted more than two hundred years and was stained with crimes and violence: in an armed clash at Carpeneda, in February 1593, seven men of Folgaria were left on the ground, and the wayside shrine raised in their memory is still there, known as the shrine of the seven widows. The comune still bears the title of Magnifica Comunità: when the bishop granted it nobody knows, because the communal archive was largely destroyed during the First World War, but it is known precisely when it ended — in 1805, with Napoleon's administrative reform.

The name is a plant: first mentioned in 1196 as Fulgarida, it comes from the Latin for fern and means roughly «fern-bed». That was not enough to protect it: in the Austrian period, under the germanisation policy that preceded the Great War, the German form Vielgereuth was used — the same operation that a few years later Ettore Tolomei would carry out in the opposite direction. In Cimbrian the village is Folgràit, because these plateaux were settled by Cimbrian colonists and the language lasted here until the nineteen-sixties, surviving longest inside the names of places. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the war the plateau was disputed between Italian and pan-German associations, and the contest was fought with schools, kindergartens, rural banks and cooperative shops: at one point the Volksbund offered to pay off half the debt some families had taken on to build the new church, and the Italian league answered by buying the walls of the old church to turn it into a kindergarten, opening evening classes and a lace school.