Egna

The two names of this town record two different moments. The Italian one comes from the ancient mansio Endidae, a Roman posting station on the via Claudia Augusta, of which excavations have brought to light a well preserved site that can be visited. The German name records something later: after a fire, bishop Conrad of Trent rebuilt the place in 1189 as burgum novum de Egna, the new borough, and from there one arrives at Neumarkt, «new market», which appears under its present name in 1327.

Neumarkt has stayed as it was because the money went elsewhere: in the thirteenth century the counts of Tyrol took over from the bishops and made it the seat of a judicial district, but concentrated their investment on Bolzano, leaving the merchant borough with its arcades almost untouched. In 1395 Albert of Austria granted the village the badge that the comune took up again as its arms in 1967: a silver crescent moon and a red cross patty. In 1946, under the De Gasperi–Gruber agreement, it passed from the province of Trento to that of Bolzano.