What was there in the old days?
The itinerary starts from the square overlooking San Martino di Castrozza’s church in Via Passo Rolle.
Immediately striking are the stones motif and the double lancet windows of the old tower bell, going back to the XIII century: the only building left of the old medieval complex once standing on the Alpe di Castrozza meadows. Perhaps the green expanse saw the passing of Mesolithic prehistoric hunters, heading for the Colbricon lakes and following game tracks, and later of Roman troops heading north; we cannot rule out the possibility that the name Castrozza comesfroma small fort (castrum), built as a stopover and to defend soldiers and travellers.
Little below the church was built in Medieval times a ospitale, the St. Martin and St. Julian’s hospice, a sturdy building on several floors hosting a small religious community up to the beginning of the XV century. As well as enjoying a marvellous peace and quiet for their meditations, the community was assigned the task of giving free food and accommodation for a few days to mountain people passing by, merchants and pilgrims who braved the Rolle pass; a section of the mountain track, before and after the hospice, was sure to be open in winter.
The dedication of the church and hospice to St. Martin, as well as St. Julian, underlines a vocation to welcoming and assisting travellers and points out at established contacts with the Belluno and Feltre areas: the building complex on the Alpe di Castrozza marked the north border of the Feltre diocese.
To bear the costs of hospitality the monks relied on charity. In a few decades, starting from the XIII century, the hospice received many donations and turned into an extraordinary centre of spiritual aggregation as well as an independent institution, with estates in Primiero, in Val d’Adige and the Feltre area.
Mysterious apparitions
When the monks left the Alp, there followed a long period of troubled times for the institution, with the feudal vassals, Counts Welsperg, taking advantage of it. The Pusteria family settled in Primiero in 1401, and devoted a good part of the following century to put their authority in place of the bishop’s over the St. Martin and St. Julian’s priory. In 1630 something extraordinary happened in the little church. Two vice-prior’s servants gave this testimony: “on the wall over the church vestry’s door we saw several times a picture of the Holy Shroud with two beautiful angels holding the shroud, and then everything went back to the way it looked before, with nothing to be seen on the wall”. That June a solemn procession was organized, with the participation of about 600 people: Christ on the Cross, St. John the Baptist and St. Barbara also appeared on the wall.
All these figures oozed water and it was perhaps the excessive dampness to make transparent the whitewash covering the paintings.
(Watercolour by L. Harrison Compton, from Reginald Farrer’s book, The Dolomites, 1913)
An old popular fair with broad beans soup
Following from the church the Via Val di Ròda and descending along Rio Pez Gaiart, we can see the old stone bridge to the hospice.
1780 marked the end of the famous St. Martin’s Fairs: religious as well as profane celebrations held on the Alpe di Castrozza, with participating noblemen, local burocrats, craftsmen, peasants and the great multitude of the Primiero poor. What most interested them was the free food, probably in memory of the priory old hospitality duties.
Let’s hear from the fresh prose of Angelo Michele Negrelli what usually happened: “when mass was over and all the people had come out of church, one of the servants would shout loudly: «if you want to eat, eat»; to which everybody would throw themselves on the vats, eating like hungry wolves; the vats never were completely empty and the poorest people, taking off their shirt sleeves and knotting up the end, would empty the vats and what was left into them, keeping the dried beans in the sleeves and taking them home”.
(Travellers with Alpenstock at the St. Martin’s hospice)
What did they fish at Pra’ delle Nasse?
Back on Via Passo Rolle, we follow it down a gentle slope and over the bridge on the Cismón torrent, then we go up to the right along Via Dolomiti, continuing into Via Cavallazza. Shortly after we reach Pra’ delle Nasse.
This large grassy expanse was, a long time ago, originally a lake. Looking at it from a vantage point you realise that it has two parts: the one nearer to the village has been modified by man with regular drainage channels, to obtain a meadow for pasture and forage, while the other one – closer to the wood – still keeps its original looks. It is a natural peat-bog formed over porphyritic rocks, where half decomposed plant material has been depositing for a very long time, to make a layer of peat about 2 metres high. The Rio Brentèlla waters run across the place, making up a thousand streams, before coming out of the peat and flowing into the Cismón torrent. In these small natural streams and ponds the monks of St. Martin’s used to drop small and large nasse, long wicker baskets, to catch the excellent trout inhabiting these waters.
Starting in the Twenties, many attempts were made to exploit the peat as fuel for the hotels and to make a little lake cover the area, until the Trento province – with a law dated 1986 – ruled that the remaining “marshland” was to be protected for its special character and called Prà delle Nasse biotope: protected marshland area because of its specific, characteristic flora and fauna.
Following the road for Malga Cés, we take the first turning on the left: we can then walk on an historical ring around the biotope, called “small O” because of its circular shape and already described in the Trentino guide by Ottone Brentari in 1895. We can thus follow on the steps of the first tourists to the area.
(Up to the right, what was left of the peat-bog in the Thirties)
English travellers and alpinists
In 1862 J. Gilbert and G. C. Churchill were the first travellers to pass through San Martino and to describe their adventurous excursion in the guidebook The Dolomite Mountains. Their report was to inspire a few years later Leslie Stephen, one of the founding members of the Alpine Club in London, to reach Primiero and to climb alone to the Altopiano delle Pale. Intimidated by the almost vertical walls, he wrote that nobody could possibly climb those peaks. But in June 1870 another Englishman, Edward Whithwell, conquered the top of Cimón della Pala. The Group climbing discovery had thus started.
After a four hours ride from Primiero, the travelling Englishwoman Amelia B. Edwards arrived in 1872 at the esplanade in front of the small church and old hospice, but she was unpleasantly surprised: ...now part of the big building, all dirty and in ruins, all that remains of the old monastery, is used as a malga, and another part of it has been turned into an inn. There was an atmosphere of neglect and decay in every corner of the old priory, marking the decline of the feudatory power, a foreboding perhaps of the end of the Primiero branch of the Welsperg family, which occurred in 1907. The signs of decay were everywhere: …the portraits of members of the old Welsperg family, now dead for centuries, hang awry from the walls or are heaped up in the corners, covered in cobwebs and in the dust of time.
It’s quite surprising to read in the SAT (Society of Trentino Alpinists) magazine of 1874 that next to the run down hostel an inviting mountain hotel had been built in a short time, bearing the predictable name of Albergo Alpino.
(L. Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf and author himself of the book The Playground of Europe)
First hotels and first alpine guides
As we enter the village on our way back, we can see the hotels lined up in front of us.
The man responsible for the transformation of the old priory from uncomfortable hospice to comfortable mountain hotel was Leopoldo Ben – the structure administrator - who understood the area’s potential for development. In 1883 he called to San Martino Hermann Panzer, born in Leipzig and with a great experience in hotel management. In twenty years of painstaking work he changed the Albergo Alpino, offering just 25 beds, into the more capacious and sophisticated Hotel des Dolomites. The medieval priory building was also turned into a hotel for less demanding customers. Ben and Panzer’s intuition was a winning one and within a few years the new Hotel des Dolomites could accommodate even the most difficult guests. They were members of the aristocracy and the middle European bourgeoisie, attracted by the presence of the beautiful Pale di San Martino, and they expected an arrangement to suit their rank: sophisticated food and service, wide rooms, reading rooms with books and magazines from their own countries, ball rooms and concert rooms... Many were just trekkers, but numerous were also the pioneers of climbing. They found a young man from Primiero, working at the priory, and willing to accompany them on the hardest climbs: Michele Bettega. He decided to concentrate his efforts on the new alpine guide job and in 1886 managed to start up on his own; other young men from Primiero soon followed. In 1892 the Berlin Baron Theodor Wundt was enthusiastic about the San Martino alpine guides and he wanted all four of them to accompany him on the Cimón climb, later celebrated in his book Die Besteigung des Cimone della Pala.
Thanks to the promotion received by Wundt’s guidebooks, but especially to their professional standards, Michele Bettega, Bortolo Zagonel, Antonio Tavernaro and Giuseppe Zecchini made a name for themselves internationally.
(The four alpine guides immortalized by Wundt. In 1883 climbing the Cimòn della Pala would cost 18 florins, while ordinary excursions would cost 3 florins a day)
Comfortable tracks for Middle European tourists
...They left Marienbad and went to San Martino di Castrozza, in the Dolomites, where they found a beautiful sunshine. Any neuralgia disappeared, the depression vanished and all together they enjoyed a few pleasant weeks before leaving for Munich. For Sigmund FreudSan Martino’s climate turned out to be really healthy: here he could fortify himself before facing the difficult Munich Congress, where he had to confront Carl Jung.
Many easy routes around the resort and wide paths allowed all guests to enjoy the peace and silence of pastures, glades and woods all around them. It was easy to find one’s direction using an accurate guide prepared in 1908 by the Friends of San Martino club in Leipzig. In the booklet are also quoted some naughty spots like the Miezens Wahl – a sort of “girls sorting” - where Belle-époque dandies would meet the lighthearted ladies of their times. The path “par excellence” was the Baron von Lesser Weg: it took the trekkers in four hours walk right to the heart of the altipiano delle Pale, at the Rosetta Refuge. Baron von Lesser, a nobleman from Leipzig, was so much in love with the resort that he financed with his own money and with lotteries among holidaymakers the making of the impressive itinerary. The work was finished in 1912: the path includes a tunnel excavated in the local rocks and more than 240 hairpin bends climbing boldly, but with a constant slope, along the deep narrow valley set between the Rosetta and the Pala di San Martino.
Literary visions of the Cimón della Pala
The Cimone, after capturing the attention of travellers and alpinists from mid XIX century, became later the natural catalyst of literary attention from some of the resort guests.
To Else, young protagonist of the homonymous novel by Arthur Schnitzler set in San Martino, the Cimone appears like an imposing ghost, immersed in a decadent atmosphere: …sinister and gigantic, the Cimón looks like it’s going to fall on me! Not a star in the sky. The air is like champagne. And the scent coming up from the meadows! In the famous monologue by Schnitzler the whole Alpe di Castrozza lends itself to reflect the terrible inner strife that will lead beautiful Else to suicide: meadows, mountains, woods and the very hotel, hosting the European guests, become the enchanting background to a ruthless blackmail.
Perhaps the fine Viennese writer had not forgotten a comment made by the travelling Englishwoman Amelia B. Edwards, who in 1872 wrote in her romantic “Untrodden peaks and unfrequented valleys” about this mountain: …the shape is that of a pharaonic tomb, with that pyramid pinnacle on the top. The vertical fissures are so terrifying that it looks as if they are going to open wide any minute ...even the Mattherhorn (Cervino) does not makes us feel so small and inspire such a sense of fear and dismay.
(From Passo Rolle towards the Pale’s north side)
The signs of war
Just after the Daulaghiri bridge in Via Angelo Mott a peculiar building lines up against the sky: the old lime-kiln.
On 25 May 1915, after Italy declared war to Austria, the resort of San Martino found itself close to the front line. The Austrian army, taken by surprise and with few men available to guard the new south front, abandoned the whole Primiero valley to organize a safe defence line on the Lagorai chain. The priory, stalls, malghe and the prestigious San Martino hotels were set on fire: they could not be left intact in the hands of the advancing Italian army. Smoking ruins welcomed the Italian patrols and close to the remains were built wooden barracks and ammunitions dumps. Only the church – enlarged in 1911 – and the old lime kiln were still intact and high.
Long years of war followed, marking the mountains above San Martino: Cavalazza, Tognazza, Colbricón. The guide Michele Bettega took Italian squads up the Pale, and when the Austrians came back to the valley - after Caporetto’s defeat – paid dearly for the services rendered to the Italian army.
In the centre of San Martino there still remains as a special monument the lime kiln built in 1911 to make lime used in building and enlarging the hotels and the other tourist facilities. A construction which always had a troubled life: already in 1912 many complaints were coming from the nearby hotels, to stop the emission of fumes, and from Vienna finally arrived the order to suspend any activity from June till September every year. It is also said that Italian soldiers took it for an Austrian fort, and fired on it. After the war, it was decided to definitely close it down.
(The ruins of the Hotel des Dolomites and of the old hospice (right) during the First World War. The hospice was not rebuilt after the war, and there is now a wide park in its place).
Günther Langes and Ettore Castiglioni: climbers’ looks
In the summer of 1920 the 21 years old Günther Langes, a war veteran with a good climbing experience gained in the Dolomites, was wandering near San Martino, sleeping in improvised shelters among the ruins of the Alpenrose Hotel (now Palazzo Sass Maor), built by his mother Lina Langes twenty years before. The war had completely destroyed the village but young Günther strongly willed to give all climbers one of the most spectacular climbing routes in the group: the Spigolo del Velo (the veil’s edge) on the Cima Madonna. The Ampezzo guide Angelo Di Bona had already tried the route unsuccessfully before the war, but now our young man could count on the help of expert Erwin Merlet. After a first attempt, half way through a rainy July, at the second attempt the Spigolo was conquered, with a lot of difficulties and acrobatic passages, and on the way back they had a chance to look at the route just covered: …the darting eyes follow the shape of the mountain that for three days meant fight and happiness to us. No longer a route to conquer, it has become an achieved target.
Another protagonist of the Pale was Ettore Castiglioni: his relationship with the mountains was marked by an intense activity; in the summer of 1934 he set up 30 new routes in the group, in preparation for the Pale climbing guidebook commissioned to him by the Touring Club. For Castiglioni it was a unique season, the season of his full climbing maturity, crowned by the overcoming of a VI degree on the south-east edge of Sass Maór.
(Sass Maór and Cima Madonna: theatre of many climbs by Langes and Castiglioni)
Winter breaks out: the first skiatori arrive
After the war, everything started all over again: hoteliers, businessmen and guides found what they had left in 1915 totally destroyed. In a few years hard work the resort was reborn, with even more capacious and elegant structures then before. There was the will to commit to new business ventures in relaunching the resort; in 1927 started a subscription to build a cableway to link in 12 minutes the centre of San Martino to the Rosetta peak and the Altipiano delle Pale, but this lift was only completed after the second World War.
The first winter season made its debut in 1927-28 and it was a winning bet. Skiing was an élite sport, but the possibility to also take part in bob, hockey and skating competitions was advertised. The first mechanical uphill carrier was realized in the Thirties by Willy and Otto Panzer, two brothers who built a sledge-way, to allow the skiatori to go up the slopes of the Alpe Tognola. The system was operated by a mechanical winch and a big wooden sledge would take a dozen skiers up to a refuge of which remains are still to be seen today, below the present cable railway arrival station.
Writers and Royal family members on the Pale: from Dino Buzzati to the King of Belgium
After the Second World War the resort went back to work at full speed: the journalist and writer Dino Buzzati was among the first guests to experience again the excitement of climbing. With the alpine guide Gabriele Franceschini the writer established a long lasting friendship and complicity; for nearly ten summers, starting from 1947, Buzzati was an assiduous visitor to the Pale. The frequentation left clear signs in his literary production: it seems that the arid Altipiano delle Pale inspired him for Il deserto dei Tartari and it is sure that the Coro peak – in upper Val Canali – is the tragic background to something that really happened in 1945 and was later rielaborated in the short story Notte d’inverno a Filadelfia (Winter night in Philadelfia).
Even the royals came back to San Martino, with great discretion and love for the mountains. Leopold of Brabant, king of Belgium, climbed with the guide Giacomo Scalet and then with Franceschini some of the most classic routes on the Pale. These were the summers of 1961-’62 and a new chapter was starting in the history of the resort: the cableway link with the Altipiano had been completed in 1957 and so had the cable railway to the Alpe Tognola.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pale di San Martino by B. Pellegrinon e L. Marisaldi, Zanichelli 1994Die Besteigung des Cimone della Pala by Th. Wundt, 1893 The Playground of Europe by L. Stephen, 1871Untrodden peaks and unfrequented valleys by Amelia B. Edwards, 1872Dolomite mountains by J. Gilbert and G. C. Churchill, 1862La Signorina Else by Arthur Schnitzler, 1924Lo Spigolo del Velo – Schleierkante by G. Langes edited by B. Pellegrinon, Nuovi Sentieri 2000Vita breve di roccia by Gabriele Franceschini, Nuovi Sentieri 1986Any further information at the Biblioteca intercomunale (Library).Black and white photos by G.B. Unterveger, Th. Wundt and N. Gadenz.
Colour photos by J. Ammon, Foto Studio Longo and L. Brunet.
Historical pictures are from Angelo Orsingher’s archive and from other private archives.
Work plan, texts and co-ordination by Luca Brunet
Set up and printing by: Tipografia Leonardi Primiero, March 2002
