Luserna

Cimbrian is spoken here, and not merely as a figure of speech: at the last census almost seven inhabitants in ten gave it as their own language, and Luserna is the place where that Germanic speech has stayed most alive. For centuries it was said that the Cimbrians descended from the people defeated by Gaius Marius and withdrawn into these mountains: a legend that DNA analysis itself now disproves. They came instead from southern Germany around the year one thousand, and they were clearers of land, people able to turn a wood into a field.

The first time the village appears in a document it is for a sale: on the twenty-fourth of January 1442 one ser Biagio sold Duke Frederick of Habsburg, the one they called the Empty Purse, his four farmsteads on the mountain of Luserna for fifty-five gold ducats. At the end of the sixteenth century Count Francesco Caldogno, who inspected the highlands for Venice, counted about a hundred souls here. In 1780 the inhabitants broke away from Lavarone after years of quarrels over boundaries; in 1915 they found themselves on the front line, among the Austrian forts.