Rovereto

Rovereto is an oak wood: from the Latin Roboretum, and the oak is in the town's arms with a motto that says everything — «with great strength the oak stretches its mighty branches». In the eighteenth century they called it the Athens of the Trentino, but the real trade was silk. It began in 1580, with two merchants from Nuremberg who opened the first water-powered spinning mill in via Portici, and within two centuries the town did almost nothing else: in 1766 the mills employed more than a thousand workers out of five thousand inhabitants, and four thousand more worked by the piece. Montesquieu, passing through, wrote a single line: «Tout Roveredo travaille aux premières manufactures de soie».

Then came the tariffs, phylloxera, and the engines that replaced water, and the silk ended. Rovereto has reinvented itself twice. First with memory: every evening a hundred strokes rise from the hill of Miravalle, and it is Maria Dolens, the Bell of the Fallen cast from the bronze of Great War cannon, tolling for all the dead of all the wars; the Italian Historical War Museum is in the Venetian castle. Then with art: the MART, Mario Botta's glass dome, is among Italy's greatest museums of modern art, and in via Portici — where the spinning mill was — stands the futurist art house Fortunato Depero built for himself. In 1769 a thirteen-year-old Mozart gave his first Italian concert here, and the marzemino vineyards, the wine of Don Giovanni, close the circle.