Spiazzo

The village grew around a sanctuary dedicated to San Vigilio, who according to tradition was martyred here in 405. Excavations made in the middle of the last century showed that under the church there was a temple, certainly older than the year one thousand; and it seems there was also a cippus dedicated to the cult of Saturn, which the bishop of Trento had demolished, provoking the reprisal that cost him his life. The church begun on the site of the martyrdom took its present Renaissance form in 1541, and in 1621 the bell tower was raised, with the baroque onion dome that recalls the one of Trento cathedral. Inside are the frescoes with the stoning of the saint, the baptism of Christ and the Annunciation, and around the altars of the Madonna della Neve and the Addolorata the sixteenth-century paintings of Simone II Baschenis, who three years earlier had painted the Dance of Death at Pinzolo, a few kilometres further up. The outer baptistery was dismantled and the font buried: it came back to light in 1961 and was carried inside.

As a comune, Spiazzo exists since 1928, when a decree joined Borzago, Fisto and Mortaso into a single body. Poverty had sent many people away, after the plague of 1630 and again at the beginning of the twentieth century, and with the people went the valley's trades: knife-grinders, sawyers and pork butchers carried what they knew how to do around Europe and the world. The mountains above the village, up to the Adamello glacier, were a front line: in 1973 three men of the valley, Giovanni Pellizzari, Renzo Bonafini and Sergio Collini, gathered in the old primary school the museum of the Adamello White War. Almost everything in it was found by the recuperanti, who once the war was over earned their living by going up to recover and resell the material the armies had left; then came the historians, helped by the retreat of the glaciers, which keeps uncovering new things. There are sledges, mortars, a rare geodetic compass used to dig a war tunnel, about three thousand photographs and the war diary of an Austrian lieutenant. The five bells of San Vigilio, cast for the jubilee year, were silenced in 2014 because of cracks in the tower: they began to ring again after the blessing of 2019.