Scurelle

Scurelle has a charter of rule dated 9 November 1552, the Regulae Communitatis Scurellarum: a real code by which the community gave itself its laws, and it is the oldest of those of the Valsugana. The village lies in one of the widest bends of the valley, on land that was among the most fertile of the area, and its fortune was made by water. Around the eighteenth century the mulberry and the silkworm took hold, so much so that by the middle of the century there was a flourishing silk mill; beside the mill a paper works was later added, which thanks to the quality of the spring still makes fine paper today. Along the industrial channel, which still crosses the built-up area, there also arose a smithy, a mill and a sawmill, and in more recent times several small hydroelectric plants. What broke that prosperity were the floods of 1825 and of 1882, which ruined works and fields: many had to emigrate, even very far, towards Štivor, Argentina and the Vorarlberg.

Then the war came. From May 1915, when Italy entered the war, until 1917 Scurelle found itself between the two fires; burned and destroyed by the shelling, at the end of the conflict it was an expanse of rubble, so much so that the historian Ottone Brentari called it the cemetery of Trentino. Already in the early twenties it was all rebuilt, works included, and the new bell tower, of granite, reached fifty-five metres. In 1928 a government decree took away its autonomy and joined it to Strigno; it became a comune again only in 1946. Above the village, under the crags of Castel Nerva, is the little church of Saints Martin and Valentine: during the plague of the seventeenth century it was used as a lazaretto, and to disinfect it its frescoes were covered with layers of lime. It was the shelling of the first war that made the lime come away, bringing them back to light; the parish priest of the time, however, had them removed because he thought them indecent, and left only the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, which can still be seen.