Vallarsa

Vallarsa takes its name not from a village but from the whole valley, dug by the Leno between the Carega group and the Pasubio; the seat is the hamlet of Raossi. On the name there are two hypotheses: valle «arsa», that is dry or burnt — a great fire in 1220 is spoken of, but perhaps it is only the yellow colour the hay meadows take in summer — or the Rhaetic root ars, which means steep, sheer, which fits here, even though a good deal of rain falls. In 1234 the bishop of Trento Wanga ordered Giacomo Castelbarco to receive colonists coming from Grez and to let them settle in scattered farmsteads, in the German fashion; they were added to other Germans, perhaps miners, arrived earlier from Bavaria. From them came slambrot, the Cimbrian dialect spoken here for centuries: in 1821 two thousand two hundred and ninety people of the parish still spoke it, but in 1890 a survey found it gone, and among the people not even the memory of it remained. It has survived in the surnames and above all in the names of places: of nearly two thousand five hundred recorded place names, at least a quarter are clearly Germanic.

Until 1509 the valley, like all the Vallagarina, was Venice's; in 1443 its delegates went to ask that the privileges already granted by the Castelbarco be kept, and the doge Francesco Foscari ratified them. Later the border between the Austrian empire and the Republic ran through the Pian delle Fugazze and the pass of Campogrosso, where the boundary stones can still be seen: on one side the double-headed eagle, on the other the lion of Saint Mark, carved in stone. In the first world war the front cut the valley in two, from May 1915 to October 1918, and the population was taken away: those of the upper valley were deported around Italy, even to the south, those at the valley mouth were shut into the Austrian collection camps, the «wooden cities» such as Mitterndorf. On monte Corno Battisti, Cesare Battisti was captured. Of that war there remains fort Pozzacchio, entirely dug into the rock, never finished and never used as a fort: it can be visited since 2015.