Roncegno Terme

From the fifteenth century the mountain above Roncegno was inhabited by German-speaking communities, who had often come from the other German areas of the upper Valsugana, from the nearby valley of the Mòcheni. In the urbarium of Castel Telvana of 1585, of the farms of Roncegno thirty-one are German ones, and the list of their names is given: Egger, Kofler, Pacher, Purgstaller, Thaler, Wald and so on. Then the sources record the language going, one witness at a time. On the eighth of March 1568 Christof von Welsberg writes that most of the parishioners of Rundschein speak German and do not understand Italian, and asks for a parish priest who knows that language; nine years later he has to ask again. In 1665 another writer attests that it is still holding on, in part. In 1763 a man from Pergine still speaks of the German language of Roncegno. In 1821 someone counts about two hundred speakers. In 1838 Beda Weber, whom the source calls a far more reliable scholar, writes that on the mountain of Roncegno the household German that was once predominant is disappearing. What is left lies in the names: the farms have become places called Cofleri, Fraineri, Beberi, Palaieri, Striccheri.

The spa that gives the comune the second half of its name was fed for a long time by springs of arsenical and ferruginous water, and those springs rose in a place called the Valley of the Devil. Not far off, in a deep gorge cut by the Larganza torrent, is the Busa del Tossego, the hole of the poison, with an old abandoned arsenic mine. Higher up, at Cinquevalli, other mines were opened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and abandoned towards the middle of the nineteenth: silver, lead, zinc ores, pyrite, fluorite, quartz. The comune climbs from the bed of the Brenta to the Gronlait, nearly two thousand metres higher; above the farms, lived in all year round, the wood begins, and inside the wood the clearings kept as meadow with the hut for the summer grazing. One of those woods is called Sturmwolt, the wood of the hurricanes.