Festa della Castagna (Roncegno)

On Saturday, we went with the Piccos to a chestnut festival in Roncegno Terme. We started with a (long and uphill) walk through chestnut forests. Unfortunately, Maya was not fully recovered so from her bout of strep throat, so she and I ended up lagging behind. We were unable to figure out where the rest of the group had gone, so the two of us ended up wandering randomly through some back roads. (At one point, Maya looked at the ground, noticed a chestnut, picked it up, and said "we must be on the right path. Look, a castanga!" Of course, there were hundreds of chestnuts all around...)

I hear the walk was nice, if strenuous.

Once back in the center of Roncegno, we had some chestnuts, some food (obviously Czech food), some beer, and some frolicking on the grass. The weather was pretty gorgeous, so all in all, it was a good day.

Castel Thun

Today we drove out into Val di Non to visit Castel Thun.

[Side note: we discovered a while back that there is a "Trento Rovereto Card" that's basically good for admission into all of the tourist sites in Trento and Rovereto over the course of 48 hours. It costs 20 euros. However, one can go online and, for free, convert it to a 3 month card (i.e., visit the sites over three months) and add children to it for free. So we got ourselves a couple of those. Now we're just checking things off the list of "free visits" since we've already gotten more than our money's worth out of the card.]

Castel Thun belonged (you will not be surprised to find out) to the Thun family from medieval times up through 1926. It was acquired by the province in the 1990s and opened as a museum in 2010. It was a great visit. The parking lot closest one to the castle was a pay lot, so we parked a ways down the hill and enjoyed a nice walk up through the apple orchards. If I were doing this again, I think I would park in the town (Vigo di Ton) and walk up on the (very well-marked) path from town. It was about the same distance, and I think it might have been a prettier walk.

In any case, we walked up and into the castle, retrieved our "tickets" and maps, and then headed in with Maya as our guide. The castle is really well preserved and furnished throughout with what I'm led to understand are mostly original pieces. It was really interesting. The Thuns apparently realized sometime in the early 1600s that the most profitable way to be a family in this part of the world was to (a) have a line of single inheritance and (b) make sure the menfolk were mostly bishops in the church. So that's what happened. The arguably most impressive room in the castle was the bishop's bedroom, which was completely paneled in wood, with intricate wood carvings on the door, bed, and ceilings. But we also really enjoyed the well furnished game room and the really cool old kitchen.

[Side note: Maya has suddenly become interesting to visit places with. We have reached a stage where the interesting questions outnumber the complaints. So we talked about the porcelain Venetian furnaces in most of the rooms, we talked about how and why the old kitchen was arranged, we talked about printing presses.]

When we were finished visiting the castle, we grabbed some sandwiches in the cafe, then spent some time letting the girls run around the (wet) tournament grounds before heading back to the car and home.