Lavarone

There is no agreement about the name: some derive it from làvara, the flat stone; some from the pit dug to catch wolves; some from the burdock that grows here; some from the Cimbrian laba, a small lake; and some from a Liebefrau, the lady of the legend of the lake, turned into La-fraun. On the plateau German names stand beside Latin ones, because until the twelfth century there was almost nobody living here.

The Bavarian settlers were called in by the bishops to clear and to hold the land: they made charcoal, cut timber and lived in scattered masi, and that is where the plateau's scattered look comes from. Their Cimbrian was lost here and survives only at Luserna, which began as Lavarone's summer pasture: about the middle of the nineteenth century the linguist Schmeller came to gather its last traces, and the last person who spoke it was a woman from the hamlet of Piccoli. By the little lake, Sigmund Freud used to spend his holidays.