Revine Lago

On the arms of Revine Lago there is a single lake, divided into two basins by a narrow strip of land, and above it there are the mountains: from up there, they say, a landslide once came down and devastated the territory, and from that event the name would come, Revine as a corruption of Ruine. The two sheets of water are the lake of Lago and that of Santa Maria; they lie at a little over two hundred metres and make up the lower part of the comune; above, the slope of the Belluno Prealps climbs steep and covered with woods to the thirteen hundred metres of Monte Cor and La Posa. The village is called what it is because it takes its name from two of its hamlets, which were comuni of their own until 1868; the town hall, instead, is in the third, at Santa Maria, whose church is already recorded in the will of Sofia di Collalto and holds works by Francesco da Milano and Egidio Dall'Oglio.

The territory has been inhabited since the late Neolithic — there remain the traces of pile dwellings, arrowheads, pottery — but the thing that governed it longest are the regole, the old form of self-government by which the communities shared out and worked woods and pastures without ruining them. They were born in the Middle Ages, when Revine was administered by the bishops of Ceneda and Lago belonged to the Da Camino, and they stayed in force until Napoleon. Today the poet Luciano Cecchinel lives at Revine Lago, who in his first collection, Al tràgol jért, reviewed by Andrea Zanzotto, uses the archaic forms and the conservative lexicon of the dialect of this place; since 2005 the hamlet of Lago has held an international short-film festival every summer, and at Revine for almost a century they have staged the living Nativity at Christmas and the Passion at Easter.