Malles Venosta

The name comes from the pre-Roman root mal-, «height», and the first inhabited spot is the Malettes plateau above today's village. On the hill of Tarces the Rhaetic layer runs deep: in 1953, digging for irrigation, a twelve-centimetre point of deer antler came to light bearing an inscription that reads, translated, «lavisel consecrates riviselchu», that is the horn itself; after 1999 excavations uncovered the remains of a Rhaetic house and suggest a settlement of at least eighty houses. The Roman via Claudia Augusta also passed this way.

The coat of arms and the market came from the same hand on the same day: on the thirteenth of January 1642 Claudia de' Medici, regent of Tyrol, granted Mals its arms — the colours of Austria above, the Medici balls below — and the right to hold two fairs a year, Saint George's on the twenty-third of April and Saint Gall's on the sixteenth of October. The comune is one of four in Italy that border two foreign states, and the only one of the four that does not reach a three-country point. In the church on the hill of Tarces stands a late fifteenth-century altar by Ivo Strigel of Memmingen: stolen in 1958, it came back in 2011.