The Death and Life of Minute Italian Villages
by Benno Kling
Before visiting Italy in April 2017, I spent several weeks randomly flinging down pins on Google Maps throughout the Veneto region and scoping them out on Google Street View. This is how I came across Cismon del Grappa, a breathtaking town with not much going on, off the not-very-busy rail line between Bassano del Grappa and Trento. The access was, if not easy, at least physically possible without a car, the mountains were dramatic, and there was a dam with a lake nearby. I made it a day trip.
The very steep walk from Cismon toward the dam took me along the lip of a gorge, which was straddled by two villages: Corlo, on my side, and Incino, on the other. The motivated might be able to shout from one to the other, though it would take quite a bit of doubling back to trek between them.
As I approached Corlo, a cluster of no more than 30 houses, there was one man tending to a garage on the outskirts, there were beautiful flowers growing up several buildings, there were two cars parked. There was no other evidence, in the middle of a weekday, of human habitation. The roofless shell of a house stood off to the side on the hill, most of the buildings were shuttered tight, the rest were distinctly missing windows. Several of the buildings were clearly kept up, but they too displayed no evidence of current occupancy. There was one street wide enough for a single car, and a weed-pocked footpath that led down some stairs and widened slightly into an area not much bigger than a living-room rug that was labeled Piazza Simonet. As I stood there, in the total silence around me, I wondered: was I in a ghost town?
When I returned to my room in Verona that evening I began searching the internet for answers. Did anyone live in Corlo? Was it a weekend community? I clicked around various websites in Italian, not finding the answers I was looking for, until I stumbled upon a blog post by a man named Walter Zancanaro containing the history of Incino, the village across the gorge. To be clear, it contained the entire history of Incino: it was astoundingly long and exhaustive—it went on for literally 100 pages—and detailed the daily life and ultimate dissolution of this village of 500, from the time it was a medieval outpost through the vicissitudes of the 20th Century, until its population, by 2016, fell to 9. I read it all at once.
Nothing of world-historical significance came out of Incino. It was always a poor village, and with scant exception it never had the resources to exert influence on its surrounding area—any brief blips of prosperity would come only from a good harvest; the town would return to its baseline the following year. But world history exerted itself on Incino, and through this small agrarian community stuck onto a mountain there is a hyper-localized prism to behold plagues, Napoleon’s conquest of the Venetian empire, the subsequent transfer of its territory to Austria, the birth of Italian nationhood, the brutal Italian front of World War I, the whiplash-inducing territorial occupations of Northern Italy toward the end of World War II, and corruption in Italy’s postwar expansion.
Undergirding all of these events is the Catholic Church. The detailed, colorful church registers are some of the central sources that Walter Zancanaro relies on, and as his history tells it, the church is possibly Incino’s central locus of activity after it is built at the beginning of the 20th Century. The accounts of the curates, as the local priests are called, make it clear that to be posted in Incino is far from a plum assignment, isolated, poor, and difficult, and they would leave after an average tenure of just 3 years. And yet, the extent to which the civic pride of the Incinesi is tied to their church may surprise a contemporary secular audience. The church emerges as a common thread that can be traced throughout Incino’s modern history, bearing witness to wars, celebrations, minor controversies, and ultimately the unwinding of the social fabric as Incino’s population approaches a vanishing point.
But Incino’s history is striking for reasons beyond its decline. While translating, for instance, I was looking into what appeared to be an editing error: a boy named Vich, son of Vittorio, fell from Drio el Col, the road surrounding the village, into the gorge (a common occurrence, owing to the town’s precarious perch). Several days later his body washed up 13 kilometers away. A rephrased account of the incident was repeated in an entry two years later with some of the details rearranged. In the first account Vich, son of Vittorio was 11, in the second Vich, son of Vittorio was 12. In the first his body washed up 13 kilometers away after 16 days, in the second it was 10 kilometers after 7 days. The level of detail in the second account was greater, but in both the boy fell from Drio el Col from a height of 220 meters and was swept downstream. What accounted for the discrepancy? I read both versions again, and I saw: in 1937, the boy was called Vich Mario. In 1939 the boy was called Vich Romano. They were brothers. To imagine a family forced to suffer the death of a son in such gruesome circumstances, and then for it to happen again, two years later, in the same way, from the same spot, their child’s body once again washed ashore miles downstream—it was astonishing in its tragedy.
The History of Incino is long. At 33,000 words, it’s so long that it may be pushing the limits of what’s acceptable on the internet. There is one point in favor of its present form: the density of foreign concepts in the text. There is a barrage of casual invocations of historical events, intermediate-level Catholic teachings, and geographic features too esoteric to appear on Google Maps. Though some small degree of mystery has been preserved (to the translator as well), these moments can be addressed much more thoroughly through external links than through footnotes, say, in a book.
It’s here that I must thank Rev. Jeffrey Walker and Federico Galimberti for their patient and thorough help in clarifying aspects of the text for me, not to mention Walter Zancanaro and many current and former residents of Incino—Luciano Campagnaro, Maria Laura Zancanaro, Stefania Zancanaro, Anna Demontis, Dario Borsa, and still others.
It actually took so long for me to find Mr. Zancanaro that this translation began as a bootleg. Remarkably, after months of attempting to reach him by email, it was only after I sent him a letter—with just his name and “Incino” written on an envelope that I mailed to Italy—that I finally got in touch with him. He sounded surprised, but also happy to hear that a possibly crazy person from New York had undertaken such an exhaustive project. I then visited in May of 2018 and met him, along with many of the other residents, finding a warm and convivial reception that proved to be one of the most gratifying outcomes I could have imagined.
Given the extraordinary specificity of the subject, I am under no illusion that The History of Incino will appeal just as much to every person on the Internet. But I hope that whatever kind of readership this gains will take some amount of joy from its unusual voice, and from its persistent fixation on the illuminating minutiae through the march of history in one isolated, impoverished town. As Mr. Zancanaro writes, “May reading it make you shudder to think about what Incino once was, and what now is almost no more.”
Benno Kling
Translator
Translated by Benno Kling.
Copyright © 2018–2022 Benno Kling.