On Tyrol, as far as Lake Garda

There is a thread that ties our valleys to a small town on the other side of the ocean: Treze Tílias (Dreizehnlinden) in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, founded in 1933 by Tyrolean families. It is from there that this gift reaches us.

Everton Altmayer, a Brazilian university lecturer with a degree, a master's and a doctorate from the University of São Paulo, with which he regularly collaborates as a researcher, is a scholar of the Trentino language, still alive in numerous communities in Brazil, where it continues to be called dialèt tirolés. For over twenty years he has devoted himself to this linguistic and cultural heritage and is the author of the volume O dialeto trentino no Brasil (The Trentino Dialect in Brazil) and of numerous studies on the language and identity of Tyrolean emigration to Brazil, a country where the memory of a Tyrol that here risks being forgotten is still kept alive among the descendants of the emigrants. He is president of the Centro Culturale Dona Leopoldina in Treze Tílias, an institution founded in 1969 in collaboration with the University of Innsbruck, author of the well-known blog «Tirolesi in Brasile» (Tyroleans in Brazil), a point of reference for historical and cultural studies on emigration, and the creator and organiser of the National Symposium for the 160th anniversary of Tyrolean immigration to Brazil (1858–2018), which brought together representatives of all the Brazilian communities founded by emigrants from historical Tyrol.

His most recent work, On Tyrol, as far as Lake Garda: an erased history? (Treze Tílias, 2024), reconstructs across more than three hundred pages, with over 600 images of historical maps and documents, the origins of Tyrol and its southern extent: that Tyrol took shape in the lands of the principality of Trent, which included the Valli del Noce, all the way to the shores of Lake Garda, and from 1363 to 1919 was tied to the ancient Duchy of Austria. The subtitle is a question that concerns us closely (an erased history?) and the very one that El Brenz has always asked itself.

Prof. Altmayer, a friend of the Association, has allowed us to make his work freely available to everyone: a gesture of friendship between the two shores of the same Tyrolean memory. To him goes the nosa gratitudine (our gratitude).