Peio

A little above Peio Paese, beside the church of San Rocco, there is a military cemetery, and in that cemetery have also been laid the remains of Austrian soldiers who died in the Great War and were given back by the glacier. It is a sentence worth reading twice: the front, here, ran along the mountains above the village, where the border passed between the Austro-Hungarian empire and the kingdom of Italy, and the war was fought among rock, snow and ice. The ice preserved everything — equipment, objects, bodies — and now that it is retreating it returns what it took, a piece at a time and in no order. Since 2003 there has been a museum devoted to that war: inside are the finds from the battlefield, but also the objects of daily use, the maps, the documents, the films and a photographic archive.

The comune, by contrast, is a recent administrative invention: it was born in 1928 from the merging of the five comuni that existed in the valley — Celledizzo, Celentino, Cogolo, Comasine and Peio — and the seat was not Peio but Cogolo, so much so that, to avoid confusion, the village of Peio is called Peio Paese. It is one of the largest comuni in Trentino, and takes in a whole valley inside the Stelvio national park. Its modern fortune lies in water: the iron-rich springs and the thermal baths have turned a village that lived on farming and cattle into a spa and ski centre. In 2002 the Province of Trento recognised the whole communal territory as an ecomuseum, with a name that says clearly what it is about: Little Alpine World. South-west of the village, on the road to the lake of Pian Palù, stand the ruins of the fort Barba di Fiori.