Barbiano

In the night between 17 and 18 August 1891 the rio Gondo, an otherwise quiet stream, came down on the hamlet of Colma: violent storms in the area of its source had swollen it beyond measure, and in a few hours it destroyed more than fourteen houses and killed thirty-nine people. Many lost all their goods and their farms, and a plaque remembers the victims. Colma is the hamlet on the Brenner road, and for a long time it was one of the customs posts on that route: in its centre stands the palazzo Friedburg, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The comune's arms, adopted in 1970, carry both things: the three churches that stand on the mountain above the village, San Nicola, Santa Gertrude and Santa Maria Maddalena, and, on the black band below, a thin line of silver and red, which is the customs bar of Colma.

The name is first attested between 994 and 1005 as Parpian, then as Berbian, and comes from the Latin personal name Barbius; but the village is older, for the first document that names it is of 855, when the Benedictine monastery of Freising declares that it holds land here, and has held it for thirty years. The hamlet of Saubach carries two names: the one from Middle High German, the malefic stream, and the parallel Sant'Ingenuino, from the patron of the bishop's church of Bressanone. For a long time Barbiano was one thing with Villandro: it became a comune of its own in 1810, under the Bavarian occupation, but for a parish of its own it had to wait until 1903, when the curacy that had existed since 1682 was raised. In October 1925 Barbiano, Ponte Gardena, Villandro and Laion were merged into a single administration with its seat at Ponte Gardena, and only in 1958 did the seat come back here. Nearly everyone here speaks German: the Italian speakers, who in 1971 were about a seventh of the population, are today under two per cent.