Garniga Terme

The name means absolutely nothing. Between the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, German miners climbed up here looking for metals, and found nothing at all: gar nichts, they said, and the place has kept the name ever since. They stayed, though, and from miners turned into shepherds, woodcutters and limeburners; the local surnames still say so, Coser from those who burned the rock into lime, Carbonari from those who made charcoal. Around 1600 a Tyrolean chronicler noted that the language spoken here was halfway between German and Italian.

The old church is dedicated to Saint Oswald, a saint venerated almost nowhere in Italy and very much so in Tyrol. The village stands at eight hundred metres on Monte Bondone, a few kilometres from Trento, and yet the carriage road reached it only in 1956: from that year the young began going down to the valley for work and three hotels opened. Here the cure was not water but grass: patients were buried in cut grass left to ferment, which reaches between fifty-five and sixty degrees. The baths are closed today.