Telve

Telve stands on the left bank of the Brenta, in the Valsugana, under the slopes of Monte Salubio in the Lagorai chain; nearly two thirds of the comune is wood, and its highest peak passes two thousand five hundred metres. The first certain source for a settled village is of 1160 and names the de Telvo family, who at the end of the twelve hundreds had the castle built that still stands. The older traces are indirect: the Romans came through with the via Claudia Augusta Altinate, and the Lombards left no stones but a dedication, because the first church of the village is to Saint Michael the Archangel, the saint the Lombards loved. In the fourteen hundreds a large German community settled at Telve, called in to work the nearby mines: today it has disappeared entirely, and what remains of it is in the names of places and in people's surnames. In 1487 the Venetians, at war with the Habsburgs for the Trentino, sacked the village and burned it.

In 1866 a battle of the third war of independence was fought at Telve, but the real disaster came fifty years later. In 1917 most of the inhabitants had to evacuate and the village was destroyed entirely. They could return only in 1919, and found that of the two hundred and fifty-five houses of the settlement five were still habitable. The rebuilding, it must be said, was fairly quick. Then came the other disappearance, the administrative one: in 1928 Telve was united, with other comuni of the district, to the territory of Borgo Valsugana, and got its autonomy back only in 1947, once fascism had fallen. Standing today are the castle of the de Telvo, the church of Santa Maria Assunta and that of Santa Giustina.