Longarone between past and future: Vajont tragedy and international fair

Longarone is an active, lively town with a mainly industrial economic system based on the eyewear, textile, electronic and wood carving industries. Numerous events take place every year in the modern Exhibition Hall (Palazzo delle Fiere), attracting many professionals and visitors from everywhere. Among the various annual occasions, the most important is certainly the International Ice-cream Show, an exhibition of equipments and products for craft ice-cream. Nowadays the town has a modern aspect: numerous tourist facilities, modern, equipped sports facilities and frequent, stimulating events of all sorts.

In spite of all this, however, the memory of the Vajont tragedy (9th October 1963) is still alive in the inhabitants and all the local population: a huge landslide came off the northern slopes of Mount Toc and fell into the lower artificial basin. The whole Longarone and some nearby towns were razed to the ground by an impressive mass of water (70 m high and with a speed of 96 km per hour); the victims of the disaster were 1909.