Ronchi Valsugana

Ronchi Valsugana has a name that describes a job: it comes from the Celtic ronk, later latinised as roncus, and means a piece of woodland cleared and brought under cultivation. In German the place was called Rautperg, and Rauten means exactly the same thing: terraced squares of ground wrested from the mountain. The two names still live side by side in the local place names, because up above there are the col dei Rauti and the Rautei slope. The first inhabitant whose name we know is one Pecille de Ronquis, recorded in 1254.

The mountain was colonised twice. The first time when the lords of Castellalto, urged on by the prince-bishop Federico Vanga and the emperor Otto IV, called in farmers and clearers from the Feltre and Belluno areas and from Germany; the second after 1412, with Bavarian and Tyrolean clearers and miners. Of those settlers there remain the names of twenty German tenants, and above all today's surnames, which are their translation: Kochach became Cola, Zurn is Zurlo, Kheym is Caumo, Rampl is Rampeloti, Ganner is Ganarin. A document of 1569 records that most people here did not know Italian, so that German-speaking priests had to be sent. Then that mixed speech died out between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — while in the nearby Mòcheni valley, more isolated, it held on.