Val di Zoldo

The comune is new — it came into being on the twenty-third of February 2016 from the merger of Forno di Zoldo and Zoldo Alto, approved a month earlier by a referendum with almost eighty-five per cent of the votes — but that merger put back together something that had already been one thing. The valley was recognised as a community in 1224, when it obtained the right to sit in the Council of Nobles of Belluno through two consuls; it was administered by ten regole, already named in 1371, and the highest office was the Capitano, appointed each year by that same council. What split it into two comuni was the Napoleonic reorganisation of 1807, and the second of the two changed its name to Zoldo Alto only in 1890. The name, on the other hand, is very old: it appears in 1031 as Çaudes, when the emperor Conrad the Second recognised the bishop of Belluno's possession of the territory, confirmed by Frederick Barbarossa in 1161.

The old trade is in a museum: at Forno, inside the palace of the Capitaniato, is the museum of iron and the nail. The new one has taken the people of Zoldo a long way, because the valley's economy, besides winter and summer tourism, rests on artisan ice cream, made by local craftsmen in their shops scattered across Germany and the rest of central Europe. Literary fame came instead with Marco e Mattio, the novel Sebastiano Vassalli published in 1992: it tells of Mattio Lovat, son of the Zoldo cobbler, whose madness between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was one of the first clinical cases in Italian psychiatry. Vassalli is an honorary citizen of the comune.