Calalzo di Cadore

For centuries Calalzo lived on timber: the trunks cut in the woods of the Cadore were sent down the valley by floating, that is, by letting them come down on the water, and that was the village's main trade. Then the trade fell into crisis — with the fall of Venice, Austrian rule and the competition of the other countries of the empire — and in the nineteenth century people began to emigrate from the Cadore. The turn came in 1877, when here, at Calalzo, the brothers Angelo and Leone Frescura and Giovanni Lozza, natives of the hamlet of Rizzios, started the eyewear industry: it is from that beginning that this land changed its economy. The name of the village, instead, comes from the Latin callis altus, high place; the «di Cadore» was added to it by decree in 1959.

The territory is all mountain, in the heart of the Cadore Dolomites. The village stands on the western shore of the artificial lake of Centro Cadore, but most of the comune stretches behind it, into the val d'Oten, almost uninhabited, which ends at the foot of Monte Antelao — the second peak of the Dolomites after the Marmolada. From Calalzo there also starts a cycle path that goes as far as Dobbiaco: it runs on the bed of the old railway to Cortina, built in 1915 to move men and materials during the war, turned tourist in 1930 and closed in 1964. In the village, finally, there is the town library Enrico De Lotto, twenty thousand volumes, which keeps fourteenth-century parchments with arbitrations, purchases and transactions, and the library given by Enrico Pappacena.