Predaia

Predaia is a new comune: it was born on 1 January 2015 from the merger of Coredo, Smarano, Taio, Tres and Vervò, and its seat is at Taio. In the census of 2021 nearly one inhabitant in five declared themselves as belonging to the Ladin language group. From one of its villages, Segno, came Eusebio Francesco Chini, born in 1645, the Jesuit who in America became father Kino: he founded twenty-seven mission stations between north-western Mexico and the American south-west, opposed the forced labour the Spanish crown imposed on the Indians in the silver mines, and was the first to work out that Lower California was not an island but a peninsula. He is the only man of Trentino in the Washington hall of statues.

In the comune's territory, on a spur of rock, stands the sanctuary of San Romedio: five churches pressed against the cliff face and built over nine hundred years, between 1000 and 1918, joined by a staircase of 130 steps. The legend tells that the hermit, needing to go to Trento to see bishop Vigilio, sent his disciple to saddle his horse; the man came back saying a bear had torn it to pieces, and Romedio told him to saddle the bear, which let itself be saddled and carried him all the way to Trento. Since the nineteen-fifties there has been an enclosure beside the sanctuary for bears that can no longer live in the wild. In July 1809 Andreas Hofer climbed up here on pilgrimage, before setting off the Tyrolean rising.