Val Gardena Ski Guide 2025: Sella Ronda and Dolomiti Superski

How the Val Gardena Ladin-speaking community maintained its identity through three centuries of German, Austrian, and Italian rule

The Ladin language (the Rhaeto-Romance language spoken by approximately 30,000 people in the three Dolomite valleys of Val Gardena, Val Badia, and Val di Fassa — the direct descendant of the vulgar Latin spoken by the Roman colonists of the Rhaetia province, which survived in the isolated Alpine valleys when the Germanic migrations overwhelmed the Latin spoken in the surrounding lowlands): the most resilient minority language in Italy and the one with the most complicated political history. The Val Gardena Ladin community was governed by the Prince-Bishop of Bressanone from the medieval period through the Napoleonic reorganization of 1810; incorporated into the Austrian Tyrol from 1815 to 1919; annexed to Italy in 1919 (the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye); subjected to the Fascist "Italianization" policy (1923-1943 — the mandatory renaming of all South Tyrolean place names to Italian, the prohibition of German and Ladin in schools and public life, the deliberate settlement of Italian-speaking workers from the south); and restored to cultural autonomy under the Second Statute of Autonomy (1972, reinforced 1992) that recognized Ladin as an official language with equal status to German and Italian in the two autonomous provinces of Bolzano and Trento. The woodcarving tradition was specifically the economic and cultural foundation that allowed the Ladin community to survive the Fascist period: the woodcarving cooperative structure (the SELVA woodcarving cooperative established in 1872, still operating today) provided economic independence from the Italian state employment that the Fascist Italianization required, and the craft product — exported globally as religious sculpture — was permitted precisely because it was economically valuable to the Italian state's export earnings.