Cortaccia sulla strada del vino

The name comes from the Latin cortis, a court, with a suffix that turns it into «a place made like a court, closed by walls», and it appears in the document they call the letter of Vigilius; scholars read it as a group of farmhouses set higher up. The place has been lived in since the Mesolithic. The church of San Vigilio, which has a Romanesque bell tower, is first named in 1337, but the font that stands inside it is three centuries older: it is of 1033. At the beginning of the fifteen hundreds the church was rebuilt, and in 1515 Cortaccia became a parish of its own.

Until the end of the first world war the village belonged to the judicial district of Egna, within the district of Bolzano; in 1927 it was aggregated to the Trentino circumscription, and in 1946, following the De Gasperi-Gruber agreement, it went back from the autonomous province of Trento to that of Bolzano. Here almost everybody has German as their first language, and Cortaccia is one of the southernmost villages where that is so. The comune climbs: the vineyards are on the valley floor and on the first slopes, a couple of hundred metres up, and then there are the farmsteads and hamlets scattered along the flank of the Mendola — Corona on its high plateau, Penon on its terraces, Favogna higher still — up to a summit that passes eighteen hundred metres. The wine road runs through the village, with the cellars open along it, and beside it runs the cycle path of the Oltradige.