Funes

The arms of Funes are made of three silver points on a blue ground, and those three points are the Odle, the peaks that close the head of the valley: Sass Rigais and Furchetta rise a little over three thousand metres. Below them, at a place called Ranui, stands a small baroque church of 1744, San Giovanni, which for the position it occupies is one of the most photographed things in the whole of South Tyrol. Beside it is the Ranuihof, a rare example of an eighteenth-century farming and hunting estate, richly frescoed, restored in 1988. And in the hamlet of Tiso there is a mineralogical museum, born from the passion of one collector, devoted to the quartz and amethyst minerals that are found here and that they call the geodes of Tiso.

The name of the village is attested from the eleventh century as Volnescis, Volnesse, Valnez, and is probably pre-Roman. The German form, Villnöß, comes instead from a Ladin expression, Villes nöes, which means roughly «new farmsteads», that is a new village. The valley was settled first by the Rhaeti, later latinized, and afterwards by Germanic peoples; around 1500, with the arrival of many Bavarians, German took hold and gave rise to the dialect of Funes, which still carries a good many Romance words inside it. In 1505 Funes was detached from the parish of Albes and obtained its first parish priest. As a comune it was born in 1810, under Bavarian rule, and Austria confirmed its autonomy; Tiso stayed a comune of its own until 1929. On the ridge above the village, during the First World War, trenches and bunkers were dug to watch the Isarco valley; in the Second the same shelters were used again, but to keep the people safe during the bombings.