Falcade

The name comes from the Latin falcare, to mow: it meant an area rich in good meadows to cut, and it appears already in 1185 in a document speaking of the «monte de Falcata». The explanation that once circulated — a castle guarding the valley called Falco — is a false etymology that came later. People began to settle here around the year one thousand, drawn by the woods and by a position remote enough to be safe from invasions; then came the mining of the neighbouring places. By the thirteenth century Falcade was already well linked to the valleys of Fassa and Fiemme through the San Pellegrino pass, and had become a zone of commercial transit: on the pass, in 1358, a hospice for travellers was built. The community meanwhile gave itself the Regole, the institutions in which the heads of family directly administered the common goods, and it kept them even when, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, it passed to the Serenissima.

Standing on a border, though, is paid for. In 1439 the village was devastated by the troops of Filippo Maria Visconti, in 1487 by those of Sigismund of Austria and between 1508 and 1510 by the raids of the Austrian captain Leonardo Felzer; when the wars ended, there remained the friction with the Trentino communities, which kept moving the boundaries in the upper valley. Electricity arrived in 1912, and a few years later the great war put the village just behind the front. On 20 and 21 August 1944 came what is called the massacre of the Biois valley: some German divisions, in reprisal, devastated the settlements, Caviola above all. And on 4 November 1966, when the storm swept the whole province of Belluno, a landslide in the hamlet of Somor killed eleven people. Today Falcade lives on tourism, in winter and in summer, and at the end of September the desmontegada is held.