Campo Tures

The Italian name mistranslates the German one. Sand in Taufers does not mean the field of Tures but the sand of Tures: the flat where the Aurino spread out and dumped its gravel, and where the torrent used to flood with some regularity. Tures, or Taufers, is attested around 1050 and is thought to come from a root meaning ravine. The village grew beneath the castle of Tures, raised from the early thirteenth century on the rock above the houses and reckoned one of the finest in the Alps; the coat of arms adopted in 1967 is very nearly that of the lords of Taufers, vassals of the prince-bishops of Bressanone, whose best-known member, Hugo, was close to Rudolf of Habsburg.

At the entrance to the village stands Neumelans, a late-Renaissance house of 1582 and 1583 built for himself by Hans Fieger, the district's mining judge: his title alone says what the valley lived on. Then other trades came. The railway from Brunico opened in 1908 and closed in 1957, and the station was pulled down; today what counts is tourism, the Riva falls inside the wood and the lifts on the Speikboden. The castle, meanwhile, has become a film set as well: in 1972 Ettore Scola shot there with Alberto Sordi.