Pomarolo

The name comes from the Latin pomarium with a diminutive suffix: a small apple orchard. The traditional coat of arms, taken from eighteenth-century seals, does indeed show an apple tree with golden fruit, and bears the motto ex fructibus arbos, the tree from its fruits, which is written also on the apse of the church of San Cristoforo — the saint the old inhabitants chose as their protector against natural calamities. The village lies on the road that runs along the eastern bank of the Adige, and after Villa Lagarina it was always the most important centre of the Vallagarina, in Roman times as in the early Middle Ages. In 1136 the emperor Lothar destroyed it; out of the ashes the village rose again as a small free valley comune whose influence reached all the villages between Isera, Aldeno and Cimone. Meanwhile, at the nearby rock of Castel Barco, a family of milites was taking shape that would count for much in the history of Trentino, the Castelbarco; the castle was occupied by the Venetians in the fifteenth century and destroyed by order of Maximilian I in 1508.

Here the custom of the filò lasted a long time: an evening gathering at which old and young told each other the latest news, embroidering it, naturally, with imagination and with that pinch of malice that made the conversation worth having. The right place for it was the stable, the warmest room in a farmhouse — and those houses had enormous rooms for the silkworms, often left open so that the north wind of the long winter evenings could pass through. Mulberries were grown in these parts until the middle of the nineteen-fifties. The filò lasted until the end of the second world war, and then it ended: the stables next to the houses disappeared, the spread-out farming economy disappeared with them, and television did the rest. In 1967 the hamlet of Piazzo was detached from the comune and passed to Villa Lagarina.