The Rules That Kept the Valley Whole

Much of the land around the town has never belonged to somebody who could sell it, divide it, or decide to make it into something else. It is held in common by the families originally from the valley, through an institution called the Regole d'Ampezzo. In Italian the word regole means rules. Here it also means the people who make them, the land they hold, and the eight centuries in between.

Land That Could Be Used but Not Used Up

The arrangement began with a practical problem. In a valley with long winters and a limited amount of grazing, dividing the high pastures and the woods into private plots would have left everybody short.

So the households kept their houses, fields and hay meadows on the valley floor, and the pasture and forest above stayed common. Everyone could use them. Nobody could use them up. Access came with obligations, and the land itself was treated as something passing through the present generation on its way to the next, which is still how the Regole describe it: property that cannot simply be sold or turned to some other purpose.

We Decide That

The Regole are named in a document from 1225, which gives the institution eight centuries of documented history. For the first century and more the rules were spoken rather than written. Then, during the fourteenth century, the communities began setting them down in the Laudi. The first Laudo of Falzarego and Ambrizola is from 1356, the first of Lareto from 1363, and both were rewritten in the century that followed.

The word comes from the Latin laudamus quod: we decide that. A community writing out its own decisions and agreeing to be held to them, rather than a charter arriving from above.

The contents are unsentimental. Who is responsible for what. When animals may graze and where. How much wood may be cut. And, at length, what happens when somebody ignores it: fines, or the seizure of livestock. Each Regola was represented for one year at a time by a marigo, and the office moved from house to house and family to family by rotation, so that it came round to everyone. He had a bench of officers under him, among them the saltari who watched the pastures and the precone, who announced his orders and carried out the seizures. Refusing to serve was itself punishable.

A Nature Reserve in the Fourteenth Century

From the same century there are the vize: woods in which the Regole banned cutting and grazing outright, for a set number of years, and left them alone. The Regole's own account calls them a strict nature reserve ante litteram, which is exactly what they were.

They were doing it six hundred years before anyone used the phrase. A forest closed by decision of the people who depended on it, so that it would still be a forest later.

This is why the landscape around Cortina, which reads as untouched, is nothing of the kind. It has been cut, grazed, maintained and repeatedly left alone on purpose. The view is the residue of a very long argument about how much could be taken.

Every Ruler Had to Confirm Them

Over the centuries Ampezzo passed from Cadore to Venice in 1420, from Venice to the Habsburgs, through the Napoleonic years and eventually to Italy. Each new authority found the same system of common land in place, and left it there.

The dates are on the record. Cadore received its first statutes in 1235, from Biaquino III da Camino. In 1511 the troops of Maximilian of Habsburg took the castle of Botestagno and Ampezzo paid homage to the emperor, and in 1523 Ferdinand I reconfirmed the Ampezzo statutes.

The twentieth century came closer to ending it than any empire had. The Regole and the municipality were already negotiating in 1887. By 1950 the forests and pastures were being run provisionally by a state-appointed body, and it took a settlement reached between 1957 and 1959 to hand them back. The division covered 16,948 hectares, of which 15,305 returned to the Regole.

Still Running

There are eleven Regole today, each still represented by its marigo, administering something in the order of 16,000 hectares of forest. The Veneto Region created the Natural Park of the Ampezzo Dolomites on their land by regional law on 22 March 1990 and handed them the running of it, which the Regole record as the first case in Italy of a regional park administered by a private body.

The rights are still counted out in firewood. Under the current Laudo every regoliere family is entitled each year to seven steri of wood, a stero being a stacked cubic metre, plus one more for every person in the house. They either go and collect it in the forest or have it brought down, paying for the cutting and the transport.

Why This Belongs to Capsule Cortina

This series began with things you can see. Rock, snow, an animal at the treeline, a flower against stone, a figure on a chairlift.

The Regole are what held the rest of it in place. The Stella Alpina stays where it grows. The Stambecco came back to a valley that had learned to look after what survived. The Volpe crosses and is not called closer. The forests and pastures are still standing because using them came with an obligation.

Cortina's oldest rules are the reason there is still something here worth arriving for.

The three the valley kept

Stella Alpina Napkins, Set of 4 Stambecco Napkins, Set of 4 Volpe Napkins, Set of 4