Nogaredo

Nogaredo is known for one thing only, and it is not a cheerful one: the witch trials, the strie in Trentino dialect. Palazzo Lodron, in the village, was the seat of the inquisition court, and in 1647 one of the last trials for witchcraft in the Trentino was held there; the local women were shut up and tortured in the cells of the nearby castle of Castelnuovo, which still exists and is now called Castel Noarna, and eight of them lost their lives there, burned or beheaded, condemned for witchcraft and for having caused illness. The affair had a fierce critic a little further off, at Rovereto, in Girolamo Tartarotti. The village has not hidden it: it remembers it every year with the Calendimaggio delle strie, and on that day the Lodron residence is opened. The name, far milder, comes from the Latin nux, the walnut, by way of the Venetian nogara that reached here with the Serenissima.

The history of the village is that of the Lodron, who in 1456 took the castles of Castellano and Castelnuovo from the Castelbarco and took Nogaredo too, which became one of the seats of the fief; the fief died out in 1703. Under those lords, though, something remarkable happened: in 1760 the heads of household of Nogaredo gave themselves a statute, and count Ernesto Maria Lodron approved it, making it binding. It was Austria, later, that forbade that charter of rule, branding it «an unlawful gathering of the people» — the feudal lord had granted what the empire considered subversive. Here too the twentieth century made and unmade the boundaries: in 1929 the comune was suppressed and aggregated to Villa Lagarina, and in 1955 it was reconstituted, taking in as well the territories of the former comuni of Noarna and Sasso.