Voltago Agordino

In the Middle Ages two powers overlapped here. On one side the regole — Voltago, Digoman, Miona and Frassené —, assemblies in which the heads of families elected a meriga and other representatives to govern the community and manage the common land; on the other the lords da Voltago, who lived in a castle along the Sarzana torrent. That castle looked straight across at another one, the castle of the Della Valle at La Valle Agordina, on the opposite side of the Cordevole valley, six or seven kilometres away as the crow flies: the two strongholds kept watch on each other and could send help. The village appears for the first time in 1146, as Vico Woltagi.

The little church of the hamlet of Digoman, of 1900, was designed by the village primary schoolmaster; but the wish to dedicate it to Our Lady of Lourdes — the first such case in the whole diocese of Belluno-Feltre — came from the travelling chair-menders of that hamlet, who on their rounds across Europe had reached the Pyrenees. In the parish church, meanwhile, the sacristy was the chancel of the old Gothic church and keeps sixteenth-century frescoes: naive, popular painting, but it is there that one sees how the people of this valley dressed. The bells date from just after the First World War, because the old ones were carried off by the Austro-Hungarian army during the occupation of 1917.