Romeno

In the parish church of Romeno is kept a votive stele to the god Saturn bearing the carved names of five families of Rhaetian or Celtic origin: the Lumennones, the Glabistus and three others of which only the first letters remain. From the Lumennones probably comes the name of the village. Romeno was built as a quadrilateral, in all likelihood what is left of an ancient Roman or Lombard centre set to guard the road to Raetia, and between 1871 and 1872, digging for the new road, the remains of a hill-fort came out at the la Piena locality. A kilometre from the village stands the farmstead of San Bartolomeo, once a hospice and still inhabited: it is one of the oldest human settlements of the upper Val di Non, and Roman inscriptions have been found around it. Its little church keeps frescoes of the first half of the thirteenth century, a kind of meeting between Venosta painting and pre-Alpine decoration, and for this it is one of the most important painted monuments of the whole valley.

The town's coat of arms tells another story. The first was granted by a royal decree of the sixth of May 1940 and carried the chief of the Lictor; in 1956 Romeno replaced it precisely to remove the marks of the regime, and chose as its symbol the gate that barred the road of the Vallavena, in memory of the village's economic independence and of the wealth that came from the wood. On the arms there is also a black key laid horizontally, recalling the custody entrusted to Romeno, and a wavy bar coming out of the gate: those are the waters of the rio Vallavena. Between 1909 and 1934 the village had its own stop on the tramway that ran from Dermulo to Fondo and the Mendola. Today people live on apples and on cheese, among them trentingrana, and more and more on hospitality. In the census of 2011 three hundred and eighty-three inhabitants, almost twenty-eight per cent, declared themselves Ladin: ten years earlier they were two hundred and eleven.