As if in the centre of a green acean, the eye can gaze all around.
The fields and meadows are surrounded by forest, dotted with cowsheds and
farmhouses, marked by the crude evidence of human madness materialised in the
imposing ruins of the front line between Italy and Austria during the Great
War. On the borders with Asiago and the Seved Communes, the Folgaria, Lavarone
and Luserna highland is a huge table, lying about one thousand metres a.s.l.,
with a good climate and sun all day.
Lavarone, with its attractive lake, the cleanest in Italy, welcomed the first
tourists of the Viennese upper class and nobility in the last century.
It became so well known that even Sigmund Freud heard about it and came to
enjoy his holiday here. A few kilometres away another part of the huge highland
is dotted with the hamlets of Folgaria, another popular resort for decades,
also with an illustrious personality in its golden register of guest. Cesare
Musatti, who was sent to Serrada as a child by his doctor because he was, as he
writes, " a seven months'child and said to be frail". This great Milanese, the
father of Italian psychoanalysis, remained attached to this area for the rest
of his life. Luserna, the other highland village, is inhabited by Cimbrian
people, a proud ethnic minority of German origin, who have survived in an area
of general unification, guardians of uses, traditions, customs and a language
all to be discovered.
In the woods behind the houses and further up towards the first cowsheds, you
can find, in summer, lovely edible mushrooms that are taken to the marchet in
Trento every morning.
The highland's environment and great spaces tempt you to go walking and
trekking, following history once again. This area was strategic in the First
World War and tha Austro-Hungarians fortified it with a mighty system of
trenches, communication trenches, casemates and bastion. Today, the ruins of
these and some forts can still be visited along the Path of Peace which crosses
the whole of Trentino following the front line where the Alpine soldiers and
kaiserjaeger faced each other.