Ton

The name is probably pre-Latin, perhaps from the Gaulish tunna, «barrel», or tuna, «cave», and it appears as Tunno in 1174, in a document about the properties of the canons of San Michele all'Adige. Between the twelfth and the fifteenth century a family emerged from this territory that took its name from the territory and germanised it: the Thun. They became one of the greatest lineages of the prince-bishopric of Trento and of all Tyrol, branched out across half the Habsburg empire and gave the diocese of Trento three prince-bishops. Their first attested residence is the Torre di Visione, on the crag that dominates the Rocchetta gorge, named in 1199; then, in the thirteenth century, they moved to the ridge of Belvesino, above Toss and Vigo, into what would become Castel Thun, of which they were invested in 1267. They lived there until 1982, the year of the death of count Zdenko Franz Thun Hohenstein: seven centuries in the same house.

The communities, meanwhile, were writing their own rules. In May 1525 the peasants of the pieve of Ton took part in the Peasants' War that shook Tyrol, stormed the castle of Rocchetta and nearby Castel Belasi and sacked them both; the revolt was crushed that same summer by the armies of Ferdinand of Habsburg. On the twenty-seventh of February 1562, after a first draft of 1558, the men of the pieve — for Vigo, Toss, Masi and Castelletto — put their charter of rule in writing, approved by the lords of Castel Thun as chief regolani: it provided that each year a mayor be elected for the whole pieve and jurors for the single villages, while the Thun judged disputes and kept part of the fines. In 1644 the charter was revised and went from seventeen to fifty articles. In the nineteenth century Vigo, Toss and Masi became three separate comuni; in 1928 they were merged into the comune of Ton, which traced exactly the ancient pieve. In the narrows of the Rocchetta the Austrians built a fort in the eighteen-sixties: it never fired a shot, and after the first war it blew up in a series of explosions, probably an accident with explosives.