Laion

The arms of Laion take up those of the lords of Lajen und Teiss, which go back to 1147: party per pale silver and black, with a red bird inside a golden cage in the first half. That caged bird is the heraldic device of Walther von der Vogelweide, the most celebrated poet of the medieval Tyrol — and it is there because in the nineteenth century weighty German scholars wanted to see the poet's birth at the Vogelweider farm, in the Lajener Ried, and pushed so hard that a monument was raised to him in Bolzano and inaugurated in 1889. Walther's true origin, to this day, is not clear. The village nonetheless devotes a museum to him, the Minnehus.

The name is attested between the tenth and eleventh centuries as Legian, then as Laian and Laien, and comes from a Latin personal name, Lagius, with the suffix that turns it into «the land of Lagius»; the same name is inside the ancient toponym of Sublavione, at Ponte Gardena. The village proper grew up around a medieval estate of the episcopal church of Freising, which owned a great deal of land here: the first mention of the place is in fact a transaction between the bishop of Freising and the chapter of his cathedral. The church of Regensburg too had goods at Laion. Two Bavarian bishoprics on a Tyrolean plateau are explained by two things: the Isarco valley had belonged to the Bavarian duchy, and the road to the Brenner passed through here. The comune runs from four hundred and seventy metres at its lowest point to two thousand two hundred at the top, with the main village at eleven hundred; and between 1916 and 1960 the Val Gardena railway, the one built by Russian prisoners, made two stops in it.