Fiè allo Sciliar

The name of this village can be followed document by document: Fellis in 888, Vellis at the end of the tenth century, Velles in the middle of the eleventh, Velse in 1218, Vels in 1255, and its origin is probably pre-Roman. The oldest charter, a deed of donation by king Arnulf of Carinthia, does more than name it: it places it in the duchy of Bavaria, among the mountains, on the border with the kingdom of Italy. The first sheet of paper that writes this village's name also says that it stands on a frontier.

The municipal coat of arms, adopted in 1966, brings two families together: in the first and fourth quarters the knights of Völs and Prösels, in the second and third the column of the Colonna, the Roman princes to whom they were related. The local lords, at first ministerials of the bishops of Bressanone, ended up as barons and counts in Bohemia and Silesia under the name Colonna von Fels. Prösels Castle appears in the documents in 1279 and the settlement below it in 1373; on the twelfth of February 1807 castle, jurisdiction, farms and land rights passed to the Bavarian administration. Lower down, the station of Ponte di Fiè was left off the Brenner line in 1994, when the track was diverted into a tunnel: the building is still there, and has become a house.