Pinzolo

On the wall of the church of San Vigilio the Bergamo painter Simone Baschenis painted in 1539 a dance of death, and it is the thing for which Pinzolo is known outside its valley: a procession of the living and the dead in which the account comes out the same for everyone. Not far off, the Gothic bell tower of the church of San Lorenzo is seventy-two metres high and the tallest in Trentino. The trade that once made a living here was, on the other hand, a trade practised elsewhere: the knife-grinder's. From Pinzolo men set out to sharpen blades across half of Europe, and at the entrance to the village there is a monument dedicated to him. Like most of the Val Rendena, this was a land of emigration towards the United States and Great Britain: some stayed there, others came back to their valley.

The two wars left opposite marks. In 1915 Pinzolo found itself just behind the Austrian border: the grain stocks were requisitioned and many men were conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army to defend the Adamello front against the Italians, and forty-seven of them fell in that uniform. Between 1943 and 1945, under German occupation, the village hid and helped hundreds of Allied prisoners of war who had escaped from captivity, getting them across into neutral Switzerland; the inhabitants paid for it with deportations and harsh reprisals, and in March 2006 Pinzolo received for this the silver medal for civil merit. In between, the map changed twice: in 1928 the suppressed comuni of Carisolo, Giustino and Massimeno were merged into Pinzolo, and in 1952 they were detached and re-established.