Campo di Trens

The comune has two names and both need explaining. The German one is Freienfeld, attested in the fourteenth century as Frawdenvelt, and it means the joyful, rich field — not, as people suppose, the field free of taxes. The Italian one is much younger: it was created in 1923 by Ettore Tolomei, who took the field from the German and joined it to the name of one of the villages, Trens. And Trens is the oldest word of the three: it is written Torrentes in 827, and probably comes from the Latin torrens, the mountain stream. So the comune is called field of the torrent, with a name a century old attached to one twelve centuries old. The comune itself was put together: in 1849 the villages here were reduced from nine to three — Trens, Stilves and Mules — and on the eighteenth of October 1928 a decree made the three into one. The coat of arms, adopted in 1968, is the exact diagram of that operation: three green sectors for the three, and a silver triangle in the middle for the comune that came out of them.

In August 1809 Tyroleans laid an ambush and captured five hundred Saxon soldiers who were fighting with the French, in a narrow place near Le Cave; ever since, that gorge has been called the Sachsenklemme, the Saxons' squeeze, and in reprisal the hamlet of Flanes was burned. There are far older things too: at Mules they found the tombstone of a woman, Aurelia Ruffina, and a sacred stone dedicated to Mithras, the god of light. Above the village the sanctuary of Maria Trens draws pilgrims around a wooden Madonna of 1470 called Our Lady of the Avalanches, in a late Gothic church whose left wall is covered with ex-votos. And a firm that has its works here, and builds prefabricated houses, delivered five hundred dwellings after the earthquake of L'Aquila in 2009.