Luson

For Christmas 2010 the tree that stood in St Peter's Square came from here. They chose it among a hundred others on the land of the maso Lengerei, at 1150 metres, belonging to Martin Ragginer: it was 94 years old, 34 metres tall, weighed about five tonnes and was decorated with some three hundred straw stars. It reached the Vatican on 3 December and was formally handed to the pope on 17 December, together with some fifty small shrubs for the indoor decorations. That a village like this can give away such a tree is a matter of geography: three quarters of the comune is alpine pasture and woodland, and the valley of the rio Luson makes a half-moon curve around the massif of the Plose, ending at the Sass de Putia.

The village is first documented in 893, as Lusina, and in that same year king Arnulf of Carinthia gave the little settlement to the bishops of Bressanone; through the Middle Ages it was a place of episcopal jurisdiction, and the arms still say so: adopted in 1967, they show a knight in armour with his lance at rest, and take up a motif that the bishops' administration had used since 1607. The name is probably pre-Roman — Lusena in 1142, Lysen in 1265 — although some read it from the Old High German words for strips and river. Here Ladin was still spoken and understood at the end of the seventeenth century, and it died out for good towards the middle of the eighteenth; today nearly everyone speaks German. The parish church of San Giorgio is of 1502, the chapel of San Kilian is of the fifteenth century, and at Peterschied there is an ancient pagan sanctuary, later San Nicolò, with sacred and healing springs about which they tell legends of the sacrifice of a bull.