Themed thread
The Spaur family
From the thirteenth century to today, a family that recurs in castles and churches.
The Spaur name comes up so often in these valleys that following it is a way of crossing their history. They held Castel Valer from the second half of the fourteenth century and enlarged it to the more than one hundred rooms it has today; in 1541 they were invested with the castle of the Torre di Mezzolombardo, where Giovanni Michele Spaur, prince-bishop of Trento, was born in 1638.
Their name, however, does not appear only on castles. They funded the rebuilding of a church at Sporminore, and their coat of arms is painted on the keystones; a Count Paride Spaur gave the land for the new parish church of the same village in the nineteenth century; Prince-Bishop Giovanni Michele consecrated a chapel at Sanzenone in 1709. A family shows in what it leaves behind, and they left stones all over the village.
The thread closes in 2021, with the death of Count Ulrico Spaur, who had lived at Castel Valer to the very end; since 2023 the castle has belonged to the Province.
12 places where you meet it
- Castel BelasiVal di NonIt stands on a gentle hill at Segonzone, a hamlet of Campodenno, among woods and orchards, with a pentagonal keep, the high curtain wall with two bartizans above the entrances and, on the south side, two lesser walls joined by a ravelin on the access avenue.
- Castel NannoVal di NonIt stands above the apple orchards of Nanno, in the municipality of Ville d'Anaunia: a 16th-century residence enclosed within a square wall with four small turrets at the corners, built around the keep of the medieval castle.
- Castel RocchettaVal di NonAlmost nothing remains of this castle, and the reason lies a few metres away: the tower was pulled down in 1860 to make way for the construction of the Rocchetta road cutting, the Austro-Hungarian fort with eleven cannons that still guards the same narrow pass.
- Castel ValerVal di NonIt stands at 594 metres on a hill above Tassullo, in the municipality of Ville d'Anaunia, with a moat to the north and, to the south, the drop into the gorge of the rio Paglia, which over the centuries has several times eroded the slope.
- Castello della TorrePiana RotalianaThe core is the great tower, probably from the 13th century, a checkpoint for the traffic on the road that ran below it into the Val di Non; it belonged to the lords of Metz, the Mezzocorona.
- Castello di VasioVal di NonIt stands isolated on a height overhanging the gorge of the Novella, at 756 metres, between Vasio and Brez, in the upper Val di Non.
- Chiesa dell'Addolorata nuovaVal di NonIn the second half of the 19th century the old church of the Addolorata no longer sufficed for the inhabitants, and it was decided to build a new one in the centre of the village, on land given by Count Paride Spaur.
- Chiesa dell'Addolorata vecchiaVal di NonRomanesque, built between the 12th and 13th centuries, it appears in documents on 21 January 1468: Pope Paul II granted an indulgence of five years to those who visited it on the days of the Assumption and the Annunciation and contributed to the restoration and the sacred furnishings.
- Chiesa dell'Immacolata e di San ZenoneVal di NonIt stands in Sanzenone, a hamlet of Ville d'Anaunia, and its date of foundation is not known: excavations place it between the 13th and 14th centuries.
- Chiesa di San BartolomeoVal di SoleA first place of worship dedicated to Saint Bartholomew is mentioned at Caldes from 1374: it stood in the village square and was demolished in 1848, but its bell tower is still there.
- Chiesa di San BernardoVal di NonThe original core of the church of Bevia perhaps dates back to the twelfth century, but the first official mention in documents comes much later, in 1469; around 1490 the old medieval building was rebuilt.
- Chiesa di Sant'ApolloniaPiana RotalianaA small private church in the courtyard of the castello della Torre, consecrated in 1619.
The links between these places come from our entries, where every fact has been checked against the sources. The entries are written one at a time: this thread will grow with them.