What culture could do, Casa Artisti Giacomo Vittone
My rooms, my walls and my steps have been going over ages. They were built in remote times, thanks to those people who were poor in money but rich in corns on their hands. Mountain farmers who used to live on a little. Although from here you can glimpse Lake Garda stretching towards the inland, life was hard anyway. Or better, it was so hard that the hamlet almost emptied out after WWI.
Someone went down to the valley to work in the factories in Arco and Riva, others went away by boat, seeking their fortune overseas. All the workshops closed down and houses like me were left untouched, like some stone and wooden skeletons, while waiting for being destructed a little at a time. Only a handful of elders remained in the village, to take care of the creaking beams and the dark cellars.
Suddenly one day, it was about the middle of the Thirties, a man from Turin came here, as he had been moved to Riva by the bank he had been working in. Giacomo, that was his name, liked painting and in his spare time he explored our valley looking for some inspiration. He immediately felt in love with Canale and its quiet narrow streets. Each single thing in this little village seemed to stand still.
Even the foul architectural development that had been modifying the layout of almost every nearby municipalities since the postwar period couldn’t enter here. After having got ahead in the arts and having become a key figure for the cultural life in Riva, in the middle of the Sixties Giacomo decided to somehow save the hamlet from the pull-out. He chose me, an old ramshackle house, and turned me into an art dwelling.
He filled again my corridors with lights and people, adding also some music, sculptures and paintings. Nowadays, people from all over the world come here and stop for a while, absorbing that peacefulness you can breath here around, and then give back what they have got with their art. Thanks to me, in these last 50 years other people have bought a house in Canale, some shops have been opened and tourists walk along my street in the summer.
Someone said once that you can’t live on culture: well, at least it has saved a village.
Canale di Tenno
You can run into the Casa degli Artisti Giacomo Vittone while treading the second stage of the new Garda Trek – Low Loop, precisely at the entrance of the medieval hamlet of Canale di Tenno, one of Italy’s most Beautiful Hamlets.
Walking along its narrow alleys, cooing over its majestic stone houses, it is possible to breath the unspoiled quaint atmosphere that mesmerized and inspired Giacomo Vittone to build this house. It is still still nowadays an important point of reference for the Garda Trentino cultural world.
Canale, as well as nearby Lake Tenno, is the ultimate destination for an easy stroll with all your family, suitable also for buggies.
