During the night of 28 October 2018, winds from the Atlantic Ocean clash with sirocco, giving rise to a rare low pressure area. The storm named “Vaia” hits Northern Italy, raging in the Alps of Trentino and Triveneto, in the Prealps, and to a lower extent in Eastern Lombardia. The Sisef (Italian Society of Forestry and Forest Ecology) has defined it as “an unprecedented phenomenon in the last 50 years at least”. Its advent tears apart the Alpine ecosystem: 437 affected municipalities, over...

In the last article, we stopped at the gradual abandonment of the Charters as a means of safeguarding the woodland commons in the Trentino Alps. As evidence of the void left by those ancient institutions, the periods following their abolition saw an unprecedented impoverishment of the provincial forests. Although it was mostly due to legitimate social needs, this phenomenon destructured the main characteristics of a balanced ecosystem, reducing the woody mass, the humid layer, the faunal...

"I could hear the noise of logs breaking, of trees falling around me. It sounded like the mountain was about to collapse." The VAIA storm continues to accompany us through the marks left on the Alpine arc. Those days at the end of October 2018 remain etched in the memory of those who experienced it – like our Federica, who remembers well that chilling sound of falling trees, in the woods adjacent to her home. It is an event that has received a fair amount of attention over the past two years,...