Longarone

Longarone lies along the valley of the Piave, where the Cadore begins to the north and, to the east beyond Erto and Casso, the Val Cellina opens. On the night of 9 October 1963, at 22:39, a landslide broke away from Monte Toc and fell into the reservoir created by the Vajont dam: the wave went over the dam and swept away the town below, destroying it. The dead were 1917, of whom 1458 at Longarone alone. Of the buildings of value only Palazzo Mazzolà survived, built in the seventeen-hundreds as the residence of a rich family of timber merchants and today the town hall. In the park of what had been the villa of the Protti family stands a monumental sequoia: the wave gouged its trunk, and the wound is still perfectly visible. The new church of Santa Maria Immacolata was built from 1975 to a design by Giovanni Michelucci, on the very site of the church the water had destroyed: volumes arranged in a circle, closed by a metal structure that forms the bell tower.

The rest of the story begins much earlier: the land was inhabited in Roman times, as the tombs found at Fortogna, Pirago and Dogna show. In 1420 Longarone passed to the Republic of Venice; on 7 June 1623 the regola of Longarone-Igne-Pirago was born, which in 1712 became «Magnifica»; Napoleon raised it to a comune in 1806. On 9 November 1917 a battle was fought here in which the young lieutenant Erwin Rommel was the leading figure. In December 1959 the town held the first Fiera del Gelato and it is today the seat of the international show of artisan ice cream: the tradition comes from the ice-cream families of the nearby Val di Zoldo, who carried Italian artisan gelato to Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and the rest of the world. In 2014 Longarone merged with Castellavazzo after a referendum in which seventy-eight and a half per cent of the voters were in favour; and the new coat of arms was deliberately made almost identical to Castellavazzo's, so that at least the symbol of the village losing its name and its town hall would remain.