Why is it called Passo Giau? The ancient meaning behind the name

Opening image: the Passo Giau from the south, with Ra Gusela in the foreground and the Nuvolau behind. Photo: Frisia Orientalis, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Four letters. Giau is one of the shortest names in the Dolomites and, in all likelihood, one of the oldest.

Thousands of cyclists, motorcyclists and drivers say it every summer as they climb from Cortina or from Selva di Cadore. It turns up in Giro d’Italia stages, in sunrise photographs, on road signs. Almost nobody asks where it comes from.

And yet it is a word with a very long history behind it — one of those names that, instead of commemorating a saint, a family or an event, simply says what the place is.

In the first article of this series we saw that Staulanza preserves the memory of the stavoli, the seasonal dwellings of a mountain that was lived in and worked. Giau, if the sources hold, tells a different story: a mountain that was crossed.

The answer lies in a Latin word: iŭgum

Let us start with the soundest source available, the Treccani dictionary — the reference work of the Italian national encyclopaedic institute. Under the headword giógo the etymology is given straight away, in square brackets: from Latin iŭgum, «yoke».

So far, nothing surprising: a giogo is the wooden beam laid across the necks of a pair of oxen. But the entry goes on, and at sense 6.b comes the passage that matters. Here it is, in the original and then in English:

«Valico montano; il termine compare in toponimi alpini (per es., Giogo dello Stelvio), spesso con varianti dialettali (ladino dolomitico giou, giau), e in toponimi appenninici.»
«Mountain pass; the term occurs in Alpine place names (for example Giogo dello Stelvio), often in dialect variants (Dolomitic Ladin giou, giau), and in Apennine place names.»Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana — Treccani, Vocabolario, entry giógo

It is a short sentence and worth reading twice. Treccani is saying three things at once: that giogo also means mountain pass; that the word occurs in Alpine place names; and that it does so in dialect forms, among which it names explicitly the two Dolomitic Ladin variants: giou and giau.

One qualification, for honesty’s sake. Treccani documents the word giau and states that this family of terms appears in Alpine place names, but it does not name the Passo Giau itself, as it did with staulanza. That last inch is ours: a pass in the Ladin Dolomites called precisely Giau. It is a very short step, but it should be said that we are taking it.

When «giogo» also meant a pass

Today the Italian word giogo mostly brings to mind the ox yoke, or the metaphor of submission. Its geographical sense has become almost invisible.

Treccani, though, records it in two steps: first the «long, rounded mountain crest», then the «mountain pass». The shift is very concrete: an ox yoke is a slightly curved beam running between two high points, and that profile — two summits with a dip between them — is exactly what a pass looks like from below.

The same word left its mark across half of Italy, from the Giogo dello Stelvio in the Alps to the Giogo di Scarperia in the Apennines. In the eastern Alps it reappears dressed in other languages: German Joch, and zovo in the Venetian and Cadorine dialects.

On that last form we have a confirmation from very close by, and it is worth quoting because it comes from a study carried out with Giovan Battista Pellegrini, Italy’s leading scholar of Alpine toponymy, who was born at Cencenighe Agordino. In a work on the mountain names of the Comelico valley by Piergiorgio Cesco-Frare we read that «Zovo (Comelico Dóo) clearly comes from jugum in the sense of ‘mountain pass’».

Some fifty kilometres from the Giau, then, the same Latin base is documented by a specialist for another pass. That is not direct proof about Giau, but it shows that the linguistic family is real and alive in precisely this corner of the Alps.

The Ladin forms: Jof de Giau and Śuogo de Jou

The pass is also known in two Ladin forms: Jof de Giau in the Ladin of Livinallongo (Fodom) and Śuogo de Jou in Ampezzan. These are the spellings given in online encyclopaedia entries and repeated by a great many websites.

Here we must be transparent: we were unable to verify them in a dictionary or a publication of a Ladin cultural institute, and until we do we report them as current forms rather than certified data.

What is documented is the meaning of the words that precede the name. In Pino Videsott’s repertory of Ladin geographical terms from Marebbe, published by the Italian Geographical Society, the common noun ju, juèl means «yoke, pass». And jof and śuogo are the local counterparts of the same word.

Which yields a detail toponymists know well: Jof de Giau would mean, literally, «pass of Giau» — that is, «pass of pass». This is neither an error nor an oddity. It happens constantly once a word stops being transparent to speakers and is felt as a proper name, so that the generic term is put back in front of it. It is the same mechanism that gives us «the River Rio Grande» or «the Sahara Desert», which already means desert.

But does Giau really mean «broad pasture»?

Another explanation circulates, according to which Giau means «broad pasture». We went looking for it, because if a serious source existed it would have to be reported.

We did not find one. It is not in Treccani; it is not in the Italian or English encyclopaedia entries on the pass, which say nothing at all about the etymology; and it is not on the official Italian tourism portal italia.it, which does tell the history of the pass. If anyone asserts it, they do so without saying where it comes from.

It is worth understanding why that explanation sounds so plausible, because the reason is interesting. The Giau really is, historically, a great pasture: the archival record we shall come to speaks for centuries of «the woods and pastures on monte Giau», and to this day the pass is part of the summer grazing grounds of the Regole of San Vito di Cadore. The pasture is certainly there — it just belongs to the history of the place, not to the etymology of the name.

This is one of the commonest confusions in toponymy, and a single question keeps you out of it: is the source describing the place, or reconstructing the word?

The Giau really was a place of passage

An etymology becomes convincing when the ground agrees with it. Here the ground agrees almost embarrassingly.

The Istitut Ladin Micurà de Rü documents two prehistoric sites at Forcella Giau, catalogued VF20 and VF21, between 2,276 and 2,330 metres, in the municipality of San Vito di Cadore. Surveys carried out between 1999 and 2001 collected there «some sixty artefacts in knapped flint», attributed to the Mesolithic (9,500–5,500 BC). The finds are kept at the Museo Vittorino Cazzetta in Selva di Cadore and, on temporary deposit, at the University of Ferrara.

A geographical point worth fixing straight away, since the three are often confused: the Passo Giau is the road pass; Forcella Giau is another, higher saddle nearby; Mondeval de Sora is the upland plateau that opens to the south-east, at around 2,150 metres.

It was at Mondeval that one of the most extraordinary burials in European prehistory came to light in the last century. The «P. Leonardi» Museum of Palaeontology and Prehistory of the University of Ferrara, which ran the excavations, places the site «at the head of the Val Fiorentina, at about 2,150 m»: the grave of a man of about forty, who lived some seven thousand years ago, laid beneath a boulder with more than sixty grave goods in stone, bone and antler.

He is the Man of Mondeval, and his is the richest high-altitude Mesolithic burial known in Italy.

The point, for us, is not the archaeology in itself. It is that eight thousand years ago someone was already climbing up there — and to get there they came through. A name meaning «pass» does not describe a recent function: it describes the oldest thing that can be said about this place.

When the pass became a border

There is an unavoidable consequence of being a way through: sooner or later somebody decides where their own territory ends and someone else’s begins. On the Giau, that decision took more than four centuries.

The evidence is first-hand and it is in Innsbruck. The inventory of the Grenzakten collection of the Tiroler Landesarchiv, compiled by the Italian-German Historical Institute of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, lists the quarrel file by file:

Who exactly bordered on whom? This is worth stating precisely, because the shorthand «the border between Italy and Austria», which one often reads, is wrong twice over: in the eighteenth century Italy did not exist, and the other party was not «Austria» in any general sense.

Ampezzo had belonged to the County of Tyrol, and thus to the Habsburg lands, since 1511: the Regole d’Ampezzo date the fall of Botestagno castle to 18 October of that year. San Vito di Cadore was part of the Cadore and therefore, from the early fifteenth century, of the Republic of Venice. A little to the west, Colle Santa Lucia was a possession of the prince-bishop of Bressanone/Brixen, as the municipality itself recalls, citing records going back to 1145.

On the Giau, then, it was not two modern states that met: it was two mountain communities belonging to two different sovereignties. Which is why, when the quarrel became unbearable, it took an international commission to settle it.

1753

When a border of stone was built on the Giau

The dispute was closed before an international Austro-Venetian commission sitting at Rovereto, which found in favour of San Vito di Cadore. The ruling is dated 20 October 1752; ratification by Venice and Vienna came in June of the following year.

The people of San Vito kept their rights, but on one condition: they had to build, at their own expense, a dry-stone wall to stop their livestock straying. The ruling prescribed «a marogna six feet high, five feet thick at the base and two at the top».

According to a University of Padua dissertation on the rock engravings of the Regola Granda of San Vito, work began on 24 June 1753 and ended on 18 September of the same year. Less than three months for some two kilometres of dry-stone wall above 2,000 metres.

At either end two stone plaques were set with the arms of the two sovereignties: the Lion of Saint Mark in Castellavazzo stone and the Habsburg eagle in white marble. Ten boundary markers were planted along the line. One of them, the eighth, is the so-called Sasso Rosso: a boulder that already bore engravings from earlier periods and that the wall simply absorbed.

Anyone driving up from Pocol crosses it without noticing: after about six kilometres, on the left, a stone bearing the date 1753 marks the point where the road cuts through what is left of the Marogna. The official Italian tourism portal italia.it describes it as a «rampart of stones built at the time by the people of Cadore to fix the boundary with the Ampezzo territory».

1779: the border put in writing

The wall did not quite settle the matter. Twenty-six years later, on 20 August 1779, Ampezzo and San Vito signed a treaty setting out the whole boundary line in detail. The Innsbruck inventory summarises it as follows — and it is worth reading, because it is a map written in words:

«Treaty and executive protocol of 20 August 1779 between Ampezzo and S. Vito, beginning from the Fortress of monte Giaù, by way of the springs of monte Termin, the summits of the Crode of monte Ambrizzola, Rochetta di Selvaniera, crossing the river Boite at the Lasta dell’Agnella, then to the foot of monte Larietto as far as the summit of monte Soprapiz»
Inventory of the Grenzakten, Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck (translated from the Italian)

The boundary, as you can see, starts from monte Giau. It was not just any point on the mountain: it was the point from which everything else was counted.

Pastures, Regole and boundaries: when the mountain was worth a great deal

It remains to ask why anyone would quarrel for four centuries and spend a fortune building a wall at 2,000 metres. The records answer: they were quarrelling over woods and pastures.

These were not private holdings. On these mountains the grazing belonged collectively to the communities and was administered by the Regole under three unbending principles, which the Regole d’Ampezzo sum up thus: the land cannot be sold, cannot be divided, and cannot be acquired by adverse possession. A pasture lost was lost for ever, for everyone, and for every generation to come.

The Regole d’Ampezzo themselves record that the common woods on the boundaries with Dobbiaco, San Vito and Auronzo «were the cause of quarrels, disputes and lawsuits lasting decades», and that while the boundary with Dobbiaco was fixed as early as 1536, those with Auronzo and San Vito took «more than two hundred years».

This is where the Giau and the Staulanza shake hands. There, the name preserves the memory of those who stayed on the mountain to work it; here, the history shows what that same work was worth — enough to justify an international commission and two kilometres of stone.

And the thread has not broken: the Regole of San Vito di Cadore still manage the summer pastures of Giau, Mondeval de Sora, Prendera and Fiorentina-Dorona, with livestock up from 15 June to 15 September and dairy cows at Malga Giau. The pasture people went to court over in the eighteenth century is still a pasture.

One last detail closes the circle almost too neatly. In 1999, not far away, at Lago delle Baste, a sandstone slab was found bearing an inscription in the Venetic alphabet — and among the hypotheses about its use, the most widely accepted is that it marked a boundary. If so, boundaries have been marked on this plateau since before the Romans: the Venetic slab, the medieval engravings of the Sasso Rosso, the Marogna of 1753, the treaty of 1779. Four different ways, across two thousand years, of saying the same thing: this far.

From the ancient pass to the Passo Giau of today

The pass opens at about 2,236 metres and connects the Cortina d’Ampezzo basin, on the Val Boite side, with the Val Fiorentina and thus the Cordevole catchment, towards Selva di Cadore and Colle Santa Lucia. The land east of the pass belongs to San Vito di Cadore: four municipalities, in short, meet around this saddle.

The sources do not entirely agree on the altitude — 2,233, 2,236 and even 2,305 metres are all in print — and the sensible thing is to build nothing on a difference of a few metres. The figure of 2,236 is the commonest and is the one given both by the Colle Santa Lucia information page and by the scientific literature on the area.

Around the pass stands one of the most recognisable amphitheatres in the Dolomites: the thin blade of Ra Gusela, the Nuvolau with its hut on the summit, the Averau, and further east the Lastoi de Formin and the Croda da Lago, with the Mondeval plateau closing the frame.

The road that crosses it today — the SP 638 — climbs from Pocol for 8.6 kilometres at an average gradient of 8.3%, and drops down the other side through twenty-nine hairpins and three avalanche galleries.

We could not establish for certain in what year the carriage road was opened: it appears in the 1959 national roads plan and was raised to state-road status by decree in 1971, but none of the sources we consulted gives a date for the works. We mention it because it looks like a trivial detail and is not: it means the tarmac is less than a century old, while the name is at least twenty.

The Giau and the Giro d’Italia

The Passo Giau entered cycling history relatively late. According to the official Giro d’Italia website it made its debut in 1973, when the Spanish climber José Manuel Fuente won the Andalo–Auronzo stage.

The day everyone remembers, though, is in 2021: in cold and rain, Egan Bernal attacked in the pink jersey and dropped his rivals, effectively securing overall victory. That year the Giau was also the Cima Coppi, the highest point of the race, taking over from the Pordoi after it was cancelled for bad weather.

It is a contrast worth holding on to: the same saddle over which two communities dragged each other through the courts for four hundred years is today one of the most spoken names in world cycling. If the Giau interests you from the handlebars as well, see our page on the Passo Giau by bike.

When knowing a name changes the landscape

Some names tell you who passed through: a saint, a family, a disaster. Others, rarer, tell you none of that, because they simply say what the place is. Giau, in all likelihood, belongs to this second family.

It is a word that has crossed two thousand years barely changing — from iŭgum to giogo, from giogo to giau — and has gone on meaning exactly the same thing: the point where you get to the other side. It was spoken by the Mesolithic hunters who climbed to Mondeval, by the herdsmen who drove their animals up, by the notaries who drew up the boundary deeds, by the wall-builders of 1753. We say it ourselves, from the car window, without knowing.

It is also why this name was never translated into Italian. Staulanza survived because nobody knew any longer what it meant. Giau survived for the opposite reason: it went on working.

Next time you stop up there, it is worth looking at the saddle rather than the summits. That, and not the rock, is what gave its name to everything else.

Frequently asked questions about the Passo Giau

What does Giau mean?

«Mountain pass». The Treccani dictionary, under giógo, records giau (alongside giou) as a Dolomitic Ladin variant of giogo in the sense of a pass, and notes that the term occurs in Alpine place names.

Where does the name Passo Giau come from?

From Latin iŭgum, «yoke», which is the etymology Treccani gives for the word giogo. Through Italian giogo and the Dolomitic Ladin forms giou and giau, the word reached us keeping its geographical sense of a pass.

Is Giau a Ladin word?

It is a word of Latin origin that passed into Dolomitic Ladin, where Treccani records it as giou and giau. The pass is also known by the local forms Jof de Giau (Ladin of Livinallongo) and Śuogo de Jou (Ampezzan), both of which mean, literally, «pass of Giau».

Does Giau mean «pasture»?

Not as far as we can tell. We found no linguistic source saying so — not Treccani, not the encyclopaedia entries, not the official portals. The Giau genuinely is a great historic pasture, contested for centuries and still today grazing land of the Regole of San Vito: that is most likely where the confusion between the history of the place and the origin of the name comes from.

What does «giogo» mean in the mountains?

Besides the ox yoke, Treccani records two geographical senses: the «long, rounded mountain crest» and the «mountain pass». It is the meaning that survives in names such as Giogo dello Stelvio and Giogo di Scarperia, and in German Joch.

Where is the Passo Giau?

In the Belluno Dolomites, at about 2,236 metres, between Cortina d’Ampezzo and the Val Fiorentina. The territories of Cortina, San Vito di Cadore, Colle Santa Lucia and Selva di Cadore all meet here; the road links the Val Boite with the Cordevole catchment.

What is the Giau Wall?

A dry-stone wall some two kilometres long, built in 1753 by the people of San Vito di Cadore at their own expense to fix the boundary with Ampezzo, following the ruling of an Austro-Venetian commission. Climbing from Pocol, a stone bearing the date 1753 marks where the road crosses what remains of it.

Sources and further reading

• Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana — Treccani, Vocabolario, entry giógo. Principal linguistic source.
• Piergiorgio Cesco-Frare, with linguistic and etymological contributions by Giovan Battista Pellegrini, La monte ed il monte: nomi e storie delle montagne del Comelico, in «Le Dolomiti Bellunesi», Summer 1996, reissued by the Val Comelico section of the Italian Alpine Club — full text online.
• Pino Videsott, Termini geografici ladini di Marebbe (Alto Adige), Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana — PDF.
• FBK – Italian-German Historical Institute, inventory of the Grenzakten of the Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck (Ampezzo–San Vito disputes over monte Giau; treaty of 20 August 1779) — PDF.
• Chiara Dalla Pozza, master’s dissertation on the rock engravings of the high-altitude territories of the Regola Granda of San Vito di Cadore, University of Padua — PDF. For the 1753 construction dates and the Sasso Rosso.
• Montagna.TV — for the text of the ruling and the description of the heraldic plaques.
• italia.it, the official Italian tourism portal — for the 1753 stone on the road and the definition of the Marogna.
• Regole d’Ampezzo — Le Regole nei secoli and La proprietà collettiva nelle Dolomiti d’Ampezzo.
• Regole di San Vito di Cadore — management of the summer dairies and pastures.
• Istitut Ladin Micurà de Rü — Forcella Giau and Lago delle Baste, Mesolithic sites.
• University of Ferrara, «P. Leonardi» Museum of Palaeontology and Prehistory — the Mesolithic burial of Mondeval de Sora.
• Comune di Colle Santa Lucia — Colle Santa Lucia e la storia.
• Giro d’Italia, official website — for the 1973 debut and the 2021 stage.

Most of the sources are in Italian; quotations have been translated for this English edition. Last revised: August 2026. Still to be checked against institutional Ladin sources: the spellings Jof de Giau and Śuogo de Jou; and, in the road archives, the year the carriage road was opened.