Tenno

Tenno appears for the first time in documents of 1194, as Theni, and in 1205 the name comes back attached to the castle, as Castrum Tenni. The toponym probably comes from Lombard — and the argument for it is worth following, because it is an argument built on an absence: Lombard roots, writes Mastrelli Anzilotti, can be considered here only because the place names of this area were never Germanised afterwards. Where German never passed, a name with a Germanic look must be old; and the archaeological finds of that period support the hypothesis. The twelfth-century castle still stands above the village, which is made of stone houses and narrow medieval lanes, with the lake of Garda down below.

Inside the comune there is a lake of its own, the lago di Tenno, known for the crystalline blue colour of its water; and between the village and the lake there is Canale, a medieval borgo on the list of the most beautiful in Italy. Canale lives on that: in summer it holds Rustico Medioevo, with street games and shows, and at Christmas its markets are among the most characteristic in Trentino. The rest of the comune is a handful of small settlements, each keeping its own church — Sant'Antonio and San Giovanni Battista at Ville del Monte, San Leonardo at Pranzo, San Zeno at Cologna and San Pietro high up on Monte Calino — and at Cologna, on the fourth Sunday of August, they hold the feast everybody calls the Fourth of August. The economy rests on summer tourism and on the Christmas markets, with farms and stock-raising alongside. Even the arms have their layers: the ones in use were approved in 1987, but there was an earlier version recognised in 1943, and the gonfalone that went with it had been granted by royal decree in 1939.