Curon / Graun, Italy: The Bell Tower of Lake Reschen

Summary

The old village of Graun (Italian: Curon Venosta) lay in the upper Vinschgau valley of South Tyrol, close to where Italy meets Austria and Switzerland. In 1950 it was deliberately drowned when an electricity company raised the water level of the area's lakes by 22 metres, merging the natural Reschensee, Mittersee and Haidersee into a single large reservoir, Lake Reschen (Reschensee), for hydroelectric power. The flooding destroyed 163 homes and some 120 farms and forced the relocation of roughly 150 families — around 1,000 villagers in all — ending the existence of the old village. From the new lake rises the village's surviving landmark — the fourteenth-century Romanesque bell tower of its old church of St. Catherine (Santa Caterina) — which has become one of the most famous and haunting images in all of Italy.

Graun was a German-speaking Alpine farming community whose roots in the Tyrol long pre-dated Italian rule over South Tyrol, which only began after the First World War. The plan to dam the high valley dated to the late 1930s, was interrupted by the Second World War, and was pushed through in the late 1940s by the power company Montecatini despite sustained local protest. The villagers' resistance went as far as petitions to Rome and an appeal to the Vatican, and even an eleventh-hour intervention by the Bishop of Brixen (Bressanone) failed to halt the project. In the summer of 1950 the church bells were removed, the buildings demolished, and on 9 July 1950 the floodgates were opened; over the following days the valley floor — including the most fertile farmland in the district — disappeared beneath the rising reservoir.

The single structure spared was the fourteenth-century bell tower of the old parish church, which was protected as a historic monument and left standing in the water. For the families who lost their homes it is an ambiguous relic: a beautiful tourist attraction that is also a permanent reminder of an injustice. In hard winters, when the lake freezes, visitors can walk across the ice to the base of the tower; in rare drainings for maintenance, foundations of the old village briefly re-emerge from the lakebed.

The drowning of Graun has come to symbolize the vulnerability of a small ethnic-minority community to industrial power and a distant state. The story has been kept vivid in popular culture, most notably by Marco Balzano's acclaimed 2018 novel *Resto qui* ("I Stay Here") and by the 2020 Italian Netflix series *Curon*, both of which draw on the lost village. The bell tower in the lake remains the enduring emblem of a community that was told its home was the price of progress.

Timeline

Before the Flood

Graun was a settled German-speaking farming village high in the Vinschgau (Val Venosta), near the Reschen Pass on the borders with Austria and Switzerland. Its people lived chiefly by mountain agriculture and herding on the valley floor and surrounding slopes, working some of the most fertile land in this high Alpine district — fields and meadows that were prized precisely because flat, productive ground is scarce in the mountains.

The community's identity was rooted in the Tyrol, of which it had long been a part; South Tyrol only passed to Italy after the First World War, and Graun's villagers remained overwhelmingly German-speaking under an Italian state that was, in the Fascist period, actively hostile to their language and customs. The old parish church of St. Catherine, founded in 1357, with its tall Romanesque bell tower, stood at the centre of village life as it had for centuries.

The valley was not empty wilderness but a working agricultural landscape of homes, barns, church and farmland centred on the natural lakes of the upper Vinschgau. It was this inhabited valley floor — its village and its best fields — that the reservoir scheme proposed to put under water.

The Flooding

The project was driven by industry, not by the community's needs. A reservoir merging the valley's lakes had been planned in the late 1930s, but the Second World War interrupted construction. After the war the electricity company Montecatini revived and pushed through the scheme, building a dam designed to raise the water level by some 22 metres — far higher than the modest natural lakes — and so to merge the Reschensee, Mittersee and Haidersee into one large reservoir for hydroelectric generation.

The villagers fought the plan for years. As German-speakers in postwar Italy they had little political leverage, but they organized, protested, lodged legal appeals and petitioned Rome, and ultimately even sought the intervention of the Vatican and the Bishop of Brixen on their behalf. The appeals failed. The project's momentum — backed by a powerful company and the state's appetite for electricity — overrode local objections, and the higher water level meant the loss not only of the village but of the valley's best farmland.

In July 1950 the inundation was carried out. The church bells were taken down on 18 July 1950, a week before the nave was demolished; in total 163 homes and around 120 farms were destroyed, and roughly 150 families — some 1,000 people, including parts of neighbouring Reschen and the hamlets of Arlung, Piz, Gorf and Stockerhof — were displaced to newly built housing as the reservoir rose over the valley floor. Only the fourteenth-century bell tower was spared, protected as a listed historic monument and left to stand alone in the new lake — a single survivor amid the erasure of the community around it.

Contributing Factors

What Surfaces

The bell tower of Graun has never gone fully under: it rises permanently from Lake Reschen, and is today one of South Tyrol's most photographed sights and a magnet for tourists year-round. Standing in open water with the Alps behind it, the lone Romanesque spire is an image that has come to represent the whole phenomenon of drowned villages.

The lake usually hides everything else, but not always. In cold winters the reservoir freezes solid enough that visitors can walk out across the ice to the foot of the tower, and on rare occasions when the lake is drained down for maintenance the foundations and outlines of the old village briefly reappear on the exposed lakebed — as happened in 2021, when a drawdown for repairs uncovered the ruins for the first time in some seven decades — allowing former residents and the curious to step among the remains of streets and houses.

The lost village endures most powerfully, however, in memory and culture. It has become a recognized symbol of the cost imposed on a minority community for the sake of energy, and its story has reached a wide audience through Marco Balzano's prize-winning 2018 novel *Resto qui* and the 2020 Netflix series *Curon*. The tower in the water keeps the drowned village present in a way that compensation and resettlement never could.

Lessons

References

• Lake Reschen Wikipedia
• Curon Venosta Wikipedia
• Graun im Vinschgau Wikipedia