Sospirolo

The name of this comune, originally, did not denote a place but people. Sospirolo lies under Monte Sperone, and in the Venetian form, Sospiroi, the linguist Giovan Battista Pellegrini recognises the dialect adaptation of a plural ending: Sospiroi meant the inhabitants of the farmsteads under the Sperone. Those people, one day, the comune counted. On the fourteenth of May 1970 a municipal survey examined about two thousand working-age adults and returned these figures: four hundred and sixty-five had emigrated; one hundred and seventy were already dead of silicosis; another one hundred and sixty-four were living disabled by the same disease, some gravely and some less; seventy were widows of men gravely disabled at work. A town that bears the name of its own people found itself having to measure them in lungs.

The land those men were leaving lies today largely within the national park of the Belluno Dolomites. There is the Mis valley, with its lake, the Soffia waterfall and the Cadini del Brenton, the potholes hollowed in the rock by turning water. In the San Gottardo area, near the Cordevole, stands the charterhouse of Vedana, an institution of centuries-long history today held by Carthusian nuns. Scattered through the hamlets are several Venetian villas, at Moldoi, at Gron, at Susin, the last with a notable park. And on the coat of arms, granted in 1927, there is a swallow perched on the summit of a green mountain rising from a silver river: that is, a bird that leaves and comes back, on the shield of a town that saw a quarter of its adults go.