Giovo

The name comes from the Latin iugum, a mountain pass, and it is written «in Juuo» in a document of 1174. The pass is the point: ad Iugum was the name of the way that climbed from Salorno up to the Sauch and came down again to Vesin, going round above the plain between the Chiusa di Salorno and San Michele, which was flooded most of the time. The community appears in 1211 as a civil administration, and it was already divided into at least four quarters, which here were called colomelli; from 1529 it was headed by a regolano, with sindaci who were a sort of heads of the hamlets, a secretary and a saltario, that is the guard of the fields. The county of Giovo and Faedo remained a fief of the prince-bishopric of Trent until the Napoleonic suppression, even though the castle and the jurisdiction had passed around 1276 to the counts of Tyrol, then to the Thun and at last to a Venetian family who gave them up in 1834.

The church of San Giorgio, the oldest in the comune, is recorded as a hermitage in 1369; in May the processions came up to it from Cembra, Segonzano and Meano to ask protection for the fields against frost and grubs. The last hermit was called Giambattista Ghezzi, from Faedo: the hermitage was suppressed by Joseph II's law of 1782. Near the Sauch there is the roccolo Mosaner, which is a building made of living trees: beeches and spruces pruned so as to form a circular gallery like a portico, and it was used to catch birds. In the mother church of Verla, which has a bell tower fifty metres high with a pear-shaped dome, the organ had been built for the sanctuary of Pietralba and the parish bought it second-hand. And out of Palù, which is one of the four quarters, came Francesco Moser, Gilberto Simoni and Moreno Moser: three professional racing cyclists from a single hamlet.