Gais

Gais is one of the three comuni in the province of Bolzano — with Lana and Plaus — which, although they had no pre-existing Italian equivalent, were not translated by decree under fascism: the name came through the campaign to italianise the place names intact. What it means is another matter, and there are three answers. It is attested from the end of the tenth century in the form Geizes and would come from Geitz, a pet form of the German personal name Gaido; the linguist Karl Finsterwalder derived it instead from an Indo-European root meaning «alluvial ground», in which case the village would bear the name of the great alluvial fan that is the most obvious feature of its landscape. Then there is the legend, which hears in it Geiß, the goat: a girl had gone up the mountain to look for hers when a landslide buried the village, and the goat saved her life; or else a farmer survived the plague on the milk of his goat, and his house was called Gaiser, the goatherd. Here the legend leaves a trace: until a few decades ago a maso of that name really did exist at Gais.

In the hamlet of Lanebach, at fifteen hundred metres, stands the mountain school built in 1845 so that the children of the most inaccessible farms could learn to read: in winter they could not get down to Gais along the narrow path. It normally had a single resident teacher, lodged by turns in the farms. It stayed open on and off until 1983, when the last family with children left its farm; shortly afterwards a road reached up there and the school became pointless, but it has been kept with its original furniture and since 2009 it is a museum. The comune changed its coat of arms too: the one granted in 1956 recalled the castles and the prince-bishop of Bressanone, but in time it came to be judged little representative of local identity, and on the twenty-eighth of February 1986 — on the thousandth anniversary of the first mention of the name — the council adopted a new one.