Sbarramento Rocchetta

At the Rocchetta narrows, where the Val di Non closes towards the plain, Austria built a road barrier between 1860 and 1864, just after losing Lombardy in the Second War of Independence. It was meant to cover Trento from an attack coming from the Tonale through the Val di Non, as a second line behind forte Strino, built in the same years at the pass. To make room for it, what remained of Castel Rocchetta, which had watched over the same passage since 1333, was pulled down.

The fort straddled the road. To the north stood the battery block, behind a defensive barracks; in the middle, a courtyard closed by a loopholed building and a caponier: the road from Cles to Mezzolombardo entered by a drawbridge, crossed the courtyard and left beneath the barracks. A staircase between two loopholed walls led down to a guardhouse that closed the lower road, the one to Spormaggiore. At the beginning it had eleven 150-millimetre cannons, eight aimed at the Val di Non and three at the Piana Rotaliana; later they were replaced by four 90-millimetre cannons and two 150-millimetre mortars.

When the Great War broke out it was already obsolete: built of stone blocks and standing high on the rock, it would have withstood field guns but not howitzers. Towards the end of 1915, when a major Italian attack from the Tonale seemed less and less likely, it was disarmed and used as a store and as quarters for the troops.

After the war it passed to the Regio Esercito, which used it as a powder magazine and rented it to a firm from Bassano del Grappa that defused the hand grenades left over from the conflict, about half a million. On 27 December 1922 an explosion almost completely destroyed it: seven workers died. The ruins were pulled down almost immediately, and the straightening of the state road has erased the rest. What remains is the western base, on the side facing the Noce, which there are efforts to recover.