The heart of this masquerade are the wooden faces of the handsome and the ugly, which are common throughout the Dolomites, but here they stem from a unique story: in the early 1900s, in the hamlet of La Spia di Rivamonte, Crispino Selle lived. He carved grotesque, disturbing, and highly realistic faces. These soon became known throughout the Agordino valley, and many people began to go see them.
In 1947, a group of young people met in a local carpenter's workshop and decided to continue the tradition, following in Crispino's footsteps, creating less frightening, more colorful, and certainly technically inferior faces to Selle's artistic works. In honor of tradition, the masks were called Olt da Riva, and the young people of Rivamonte began wearing them during the Carnival season.
In 2020, this masquerade was officially revived for Carnival, again by the town's young people, with more or less recent masks, but always with a traditionalist spirit.
Text by Antonio Gheno
04-30-2026
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