Passo Staulanza: why is it called that? The story of the Zoldo stavoli

Opening image: Monte Pelmo and the Val Fiorentina seen from Selva di Cadore, on the northern side of the Passo Staulanza. Photo: Ximonic (Simo Räsänen), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

There are names we are so used to saying that we no longer hear what they mean. Staulanza is one of them.

For anyone who lives in or visits the Val di Zoldo, it is the name of the pass that closes the valley to the north, beneath the unmistakable bulk of the Pelmo. It is a road, a climb for cyclists, a starting point for walks, and one of the best-known passes in the Belluno Dolomites.

But long before there were tarmac, cars, bicycles and tourism, that name was already telling a story. And the story it told was how people lived in these mountains.

Its origin takes us back to the stavoli — the seasonal dwellings used during the months spent on the high pastures — and to a world in which going up into the mountains did not mean going on holiday, but going to work. It is a small word that holds centuries of Dolomite history.

Staulanza: an etymology that leaves little room for doubt

In this case we do not have to rely on evocative interpretations or on legends passed down by word of mouth. The source is about as authoritative as it gets: the Treccani, Italy’s national encyclopaedic institute.

Its dictionary has a dedicated entry for staulanza, defining it as a Cadorine word derived from stavolo. The original meaning is the act of staying in a stavolo; the word later widened to mean the settlement itself.

And the Treccani takes one further step that matters a great deal here: it explicitly names the Passo Staulanza, the Dolomite pass linking the Zoldo valley with that of the Fiorentina stream. What we have, then, is a rare and valuable case: a place name whose linguistic explanation is tied directly to the place by a national dictionary.

But what was a stavolo?

To really understand the name of the pass we need to set aside, for a moment, the modern image of the Staulanza and picture these mountains before tourism.

Here too the Treccani helps. The word stavolo comes from Latin stabŭlum and denotes a seasonal dwelling typical of mountain country, particularly widespread in the Cadore and comparable in function to other forms of Alpine settlement such as the malga (summer dairy) or the maso (farmstead).

A stavolo, then, was not simply a «little mountain house». It was part of an economic and social system. When people and animals moved up to the higher pastures in the warm season, they needed places to stop, to keep the livestock, to store the hay, to work, and to get through days that followed a rhythm entirely different from that of the valley floor.

The high mountain was a place of work. And it is precisely that reality which survives in the name Staulanza.

It is worth looking closely at how these buildings were made. They are not houses in the sense we mean today: they are working machines, with the byre on the ground floor, the hay loft above, and the space for people cut down to the bare minimum.

Everything was organised around two things: the hay and the animals. The rest came afterwards.

Before the pass, there were the pastures

Today we look at the Passo Staulanza mainly as a point on the map. On one side the Val di Zoldo, on the other the Val Fiorentina. In front, one of the most powerful sights in the Dolomites: the Pelmo and the Pelmetto.

But for the people who lived in these valleys for centuries, geography read differently. A wood was a resource. A meadow had an owner, or belonged collectively to a community. A pasture had precise rules. A spring could be essential. A stavolo made it possible to use land far from the village for part of the year.

And a pass was not first of all a view: it was a crossing. The name Staulanza was born inside this way of inhabiting the land.

The Zoldo of the Regole, the woods and the pastures

The history of the Val di Zoldo helps to show how much all this mattered. For centuries the valley was organised through the Regole, ancient communities that collectively administered a fundamental share of the territory’s resources.

The municipality of Val di Zoldo records that among the Regole was distributed «the use and the protection of the pastures and the woods» granted to the various communities. There were ten of them, and they bore names that are still those of the villages: Regola Grande di Fornesiche, Regola di Forno, di Campo, di Astragal, di Dont, di Goima, Regola Grande di Coi, di Fusine, di Maroso, di Pecol.

This was not, then, a wild and undifferentiated landscape. The mountain was walked, known, used and regulated. Every meadow, wood, watercourse, path and grazing area could have a precise function. And very often it had a name as well. The place names of the Dolomites are born largely from this.

There is also an older detail, and it is worth reporting for exactly what it is. In the municipality’s historical account, the area of the Staulanza and the Fertazza appears as the point reached by the expansion of Julium Carnicum from Carnia through the Passo della Mauria — and Roman-era boundary inscriptions survive on the Civetta. This is a local authority’s reconstruction, not archaeological proof we can verify here: we mention it because it suggests how far back the role of this pass as a border may reach.

Staulanza does not describe a mountain: it describes a human presence

This is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of all. The name Pelmo identifies a mountain. The name Civetta another great mountain. Staulanza, by contrast, speaks to us directly about people inside the mountain.

It does not describe a summit or the shape of the rock. It preserves the memory of seasonal dwelling, of the movement towards the pastures, and of the buildings that life required. It is as if, saying «Staulanza», we went on unknowingly remembering generations of people who climbed all the way up here in order to work.

Forcella Staulanza, the high gateway to the Val di Zoldo

Geographically too, the pass is one of the essential gateways to the Zoldo country: from here the road drops towards Pecol and the heart of the Val di Zoldo, following the course of the Maè stream; on the other side it leads towards the Val Fiorentina and Selva di Cadore.

The Treccani, in its entry on the Valle di Zoldo, places it «between the Zoldo Alps group (Pelmo, 3,168 m) and the Agordo group, which culminates in the Civetta (3,220 m)», and notes that the Maè rises from the eastern slopes of that massif.

The pass is therefore at once a border, a link and a crossing point. But its name predates the road-and-tourism role we give it today.

Beneath the Pelmo, a landscape that still holds that history

It is not hard to see why a name tied to the stavoli should have survived precisely here. Even today the landscape around the Staulanza alternates woods with open stretches of pasture.

A little below the pass, between the Pelmo and the Civetta, stands the Malga Staulanza, run by one family from late spring to the end of summer: a working summer dairy that is also a farm restaurant, and that continues — in evidently different forms — the trade for which these meadows came into being.

The mountain of today is of course not the mountain of a few centuries ago. But the thread has not been broken entirely. The pasture we see from the car window, the malga, the meadows at the foot of the Pelmo and the very name of the pass all belong to different chapters of the same story.

When names become documents

It is easy to treat place names as a curiosity. In fact they can be genuine historical documents.

A building can disappear. An economic activity can cease. A population can change its habits. A new road can replace the old track. But the name usually stays. And so a word goes on carrying information even when the people saying it no longer know what it means.

Staulanza is exactly one of those cases. In the name of a pass crossed today by walkers, skiers, drivers, motorcyclists and cyclists, the memory survives of a completely different mountain: the one of the stavoli and of the people who spent part of the year in them.

From Latin to the Dolomites: a word that travelled through time

There is one last detail that makes this story even more evocative. The Treccani traces stavolo back to Latin stabŭlum, the same root as Italian stabbio (a fold or pen). The starting idea is therefore that of the place where people or animals stop and stay.

Through centuries of linguistic change that word entered the Alpine dialects, adapted to local speech and produced staulanza. Then one of those staulanze became so identified with the place that it gave its name to the whole pass.

Today we simply say: Passo Staulanza. Behind those two words, though, we can read a much longer journey: Latin → local dialect → pastoral life → settlement → territory → place name.

A name that changes the way you look at the pass

Next time you reach the Staulanza, it is worth stopping for a moment. Look at the Pelmo. Look at the meadows. Look at the wood. And try, for a few seconds, to erase the tarmac and the cars from the picture.

That place did not come into being as a viewpoint. For generations it was part of a mountain that was lived in and worked. And that is perhaps the deepest attraction of toponymy: when we discover what a name means, even a landscape we thought we knew changes.

Staulanza is not just the name of a pass. It is a small linguistic trace left by the people who inhabited the Dolomites before us.

Frequently asked questions about the Passo Staulanza

Why is it called Passo Staulanza?

The name comes from stavolo, a word for a seasonal dwelling characteristic of the Alpine environment. According to the Treccani dictionary, staulanza is a Cadorine word that originally meant staying in a stavolo and, by extension, the settlement itself; the same entry explicitly names the Passo Staulanza. The place name therefore preserves the memory of seasonal settlements and of the high-altitude pastoral economy.

What does «stavolo» mean?

It comes from Latin stabŭlum. In the Alps it denotes a seasonal dwelling used for farming and grazing, comparable in some respects to the malga or the maso, and particularly widespread in the Cadore.

Does Staulanza mean «a place full of stavoli»?

Not exactly, and that shortcut is best avoided. The Treccani defines staulanza properly as the dwelling or stay in a stavolo, with a later extension of the meaning to the settlement itself. The connection with the stavoli is certain; reading it as «a place full of stavoli» would be less precise.

Does the Passo Staulanza belong to the Val di Zoldo?

It forms the head of the main Zoldo valley and links the Val di Zoldo with the Val Fiorentina. It is one of the emblematic places of the upper Val di Zoldo, beneath the Pelmo massif.

Sources and further reading

• Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana — Treccani, Vocabolario, entry staulanza.
• Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana — Treccani, Vocabolario, entry stàvolo.
• Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana — Treccani, entry Valle di Zoldo.
• Comune di Val di Zoldo, Storia antica and Cenni storici, for the Regole, the woods and the pastures.
• Fondazione DMO Dolomiti Bellunesi, entry on Malga Staulanza.

The sources are in Italian; quotations have been translated for this English edition.