Fornace

The name comes from the furnaces: those in which the ore dug from the silver mines of the Argentario, the plateau above the village, was smelted. Today up there you see gentle meadows and green woods, but for much of the Middle Ages that subsoil was pierced by thousands of men with a very dense net of horizontal galleries, the canope, and vertical shafts, the cadini, to pull out with toil and danger the silver-bearing galena. The monte Piano path, which starts from the village and circles the eastern spurs of the Argentario, passes in front of the canopa del Raita, the largest and best preserved: a cavern that sinks into the rock. Legend says the diggers were dwarves — one deduces it from the size of the galleries — and that, once all the silver had been carried to Trento, they were feasted with a banquet that was a trap: they died poisoned. Another version puts the miners' representatives in the dwarves' place and, at the head of the table, Bernardo Cles, who is said to have survived thanks to an antidote of marangolo, a kind of bitter orange. Legend or not, the marangolo tree in the courtyard of the Buonconsiglio really is there.

Fornace is named in documents of 845 and belonged to the Magnifica Comunità Pinetana, although already in the thirteenth century it had a mayor and a juror of its own. With a deed of the twenty-ninth of April 1519 it broke away for good, fixing the boundaries it still has and obtaining in the Val di Fiemme a territory of woods and pastures, the Campo Larice, where from time immemorial it had exercised the common right to timber, pasture and game; in 1573 it gave itself its own statutes, of which the original can no longer be found. Oral tradition tells that, as a punishment for breaking the pact with Pinè, its rights were confined to the most remote and awkward corner, beyond Campo Larice: that far-off wood, kept and improved for centuries, the village still calls its wooden strongbox. The silver has been finished for almost five hundred years; poverty, between 1874 and 1877, took about two hundred and forty people to Brazil, to the state of Santa Catarina; and today people live on porphyry, quarried on monte Gorsa and monte Piano, with more than three hundred at work in it.