Marebbe

This comune has two ancient names, and each looks at the place from a different standpoint. The Ladin name, attested as Marubium in 1214, comes from a pre-Roman word, marra, meaning a heap of stones: it is the description of someone standing here and seeing the ground under his feet. The German name, Enneberg, is documented even earlier — Ennepergs in 1039 — and means «beyond the mountain»: it is the description of someone looking from outside, from another valley, placing this one in relation to his own. The Rhaetian peoples who lived here were subjected by the Romans around fifteen years before Christ and took on the Latin tongue, which over time became Ladin: today more than nine inhabitants out of ten have it as their mother tongue, and every hamlet bears three names, one per language.

The coat of arms, adopted in 1969, is quartered and in its lower half has two dogs. One is the head of a silver dog with a gold collar on a red field, the insignia of the lords of Ros, who in the thirteenth century had a castle in the village; the other is a black hound holding a red bone in its jaws, and it is the arms of the Pracken, one of the oldest families in Tyrol, which had property here. Above them stand the Tyrolean eagle and the insignia of Austria. The medieval colonisation of the valley was the work of the bishops of Bressanone and of the Benedictine monastery of Castel Badia, at the northern mouth; San Vigilio later became the jurisdictional seat of the Marebbe and Badia valleys. Tourism begins in the twenties, first in summer and then in winter: the first high mountain hut, the Fanes, was opened by two brothers in 1928.