Chienes

Two Roman milestones of the road that ran from Aguntum to Vipitenum have been found here. One carries a dedication to the emperors Carus and Carinus and the year 283. The other, dedicated to Septimius Severus in 201, turned up at Casteldarne — but not at the roadside: it had been reused as building material inside a wall. Cut into the stone is the distance from Aguntum, sixty-seven Roman miles, and it is from that number that it was understood that it originally stood at Vandoies, a good way further off. The stone, in short, still says where it was taken from.

The village is written Kiehna in a document of the bishop's church of Freising drawn up between 1005 and 1039, which mentions a Romanesque church; then Chiens, and Chienes again in 1207. The place name is of pre-Roman origin, and the Italian form, created only in the early twentieth century, reproduces precisely the ancient one that stands in the medieval papers. The coat of arms, adopted in 1961, is taken from that of the Schöneck and is almost identical to the emblem of the old court of Scaunia, which had jurisdiction over Falzes, Vandoies and Terento as well; the silver star has five points because the comune has five villages. In the peasants' war of 1524 and 1525 this was a centre of the Anabaptists. The counts Künigl held the place in fief and still own Castel Ehrenburg; to one of them, prince-bishop of Bressanone, is owed a considerable prosperity of the village in the first half of the seventeen hundreds. At San Sigismondo the parish church keeps the oldest and best preserved altar in Tyrol, of about 1430; and behind the railway station, in the Rienza, there were baths where people once went to take a cure.