Mazzin

Mazzin is a scattered comune of the upper Val di Fassa, and its administrative centre is not Mazzin: the town offices are at Fontanazzo. The village is Ladin — in the census of 2001, 381 inhabitants out of 440 declared Ladin as their mother tongue — and its name is uncertain: it seems to come from Macirnosc, connected with milling, and in 1370 it was written Mazung. The rio Udai, coming down from the Catinaccio, cuts the village in two.

Mazzin is the village of the pitores, the decorators who in the nineteenth century set out each season for the Austro-Hungarian empire, Bavaria, Hungary and Switzerland: they frescoed house fronts and painted wooden rooms, furniture, doors and even working tools in oils. Their palette was white, yellow, red, orange, green and black, but the colour that made them recognisable was the blue that German speakers called Fassanerblau. From the past there remain Casa Costazza, which carries the date 1518 on its portal and was the seat of the bishop's vicar and of the prisons of Fassa, and Casa Battel, the old inn of the black man, of which it was said that spirits lived there. Between the village and Campestrin stands the shrine of the ghosts: at night, they say, little flames are seen coming down the meadows in procession.