Pieve Tesino

Pieve Tesino sits at 843 metres on the Altopiano del Tesino, a small plateau in eastern Trentino about forty kilometres from Trento, shared with the villages of Castello Tesino and Cinte Tesino. The plateau's isolation shaped its economy: with little arable land to keep them, generations of families went out across Europe instead, working as itinerant sellers of prints, books and small art objects, and some of them settled permanently, founding shops as far off as Madrid and Saint Petersburg.

That outward movement sits alongside the village's other export, a man rather than a trade. Alcide De Gasperi was born here in 1881 and went on to lead eight successive governments between 1945 and 1953, working alongside Schuman, Adenauer and Monnet on the early shape of European integration. Above the houses, the arboretum climbs through alpine flora to a garden built in the shape of a parliamentary chamber, a piece of landscaping that answers his career directly rather than referring back to the trading families below.

The plateau, in other words, has sent two things outward across the same borders: goods carried by hand, and an idea of how the continent's institutions might fit together. Both are commemorated here, but neither was built here to stay.