Ischiazza

Ischiazza was a frazione of the comune of Valfloriana, in the province of Trento, abandoned after it was badly damaged by a flood in 1966.

Historical information about the settlement is scarce; it already appears on a map from 1734. In 1867 a small church dedicated to the Exaltation of the Holy Cross was built and blessed in 1869 or 1870; the village also had a lime kiln and a bread oven (their ruins can be seen along the mule track down to the village). In 1909 a school was set up in private rooms (before that, children had to go to Casatta, the seat of the comune), which stayed open until the 1946-47 school year. Before the evacuation, all the families had the surname Tonini.

The village was devastated by the torrential rains that struck all of Trentino in November 1966. After a first landslide swept away some houses, the inhabitants left in a hurry of their own accord, mainly for fear that the Stramentizzo dam, just half a kilometre upstream, might give way. It did not, but water and debris overflowed the dam, and on the night of Friday 4 November the flooded Avisio hit the village. Nobody died, but the village was judged beyond repair, and the damage in the rest of the area was also heavy; Maso, another hamlet of Valfloriana, suffered a similar fate, wrecked by the Barcatta stream. Later the church was stripped of its sacred furnishings, which were carried in procession to the parish church of San Floriano in Casatta.

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · translated from Italian