Laces

The name comes from a plant: the German Latsche, the mountain pine, itself from the Latin laqueus; the village is recorded as Lacis as early as 1185. The coat of arms, on the other hand, belongs to somebody else: it was the Annenbergs', who from 1312 until the family died out in 1694 lived in the castle above the village, and the comune took over their arms. Squeezed between the Venoste Alps and the Ortles range, Latsch has a climate very dry for the region — about five hundred millimetres of rain a year against nine hundred at Innsbruck — and more hours of sun than the alpine average.

On the twenty-second of May 1499, during the Engadine war, the area was devastated by the battle of the Calva: some eight thousand men on each side, in good part Venostan peasants who found themselves fighting their own people, because the valley was divided among different powers. The Swiss surrounded the imperial camp by night and gave the signal to attack by setting fire to haystacks; about four thousand died on each side, and part of the Venostan levy withdrew on realising whom they were killing. After the victory the winners burned the villages.