Badia

The village is called Badia, abbey, but the abbey is elsewhere: the name comes from the Benedictine convent of Sonnenburg, near Brunico, which owned these lands and led their settlement. The toponym is attested as Aptei in 1325 and as Badia in 1347, which is to say the village carries the name of its own landlord. Ladin is still spoken here, and the reason can be dated: until the end of the nineteenth century the valley had nothing but a bridle path, and the carriage road was rebuilt from 1885 and opened in 1892.

Above the village, at the foot of the Sasso di Santa Croce, stands the sanctuary of Santa Croce, consecrated in 1484 over an older building and enlarged in the seventeenth century. In the hamlets there are houses worth the walk: the birthplace of Josef Freinademetz, a missionary in China, has its cellar fitted out as a chapel, and there also survives a water-powered carding mill of the late nineteenth century, one of the few technical monuments of South Tyrolean farming tradition still standing. The municipal arms are those of the Winkler von Colz family, who held Castel Colz at La Villa: they were adopted in 1967 in place of the ones granted by royal decree in 1937.