Marlengo

Above the village, along the steep slope, runs the Marlengo waal: an almost horizontal channel, twelve kilometres long, which is the longest artificial watercourse of its kind in South Tyrol. It was dug between 1737 and 1756 at the suggestion of the charterhouse of Monte Sant'Angelo, in the Val Senales, which owned vineyards down here and needed to water them. On that water the village still lives: apples, mostly Golden and Gala, and vines — and every year, on the second Sunday after Pentecost, the statue of pope saint Urban, patron of the winegrowers, is carried in procession through the streets and the vineyards. The growers' cooperative was founded in 1937 and has a couple of hundred members between Marlengo and Cermes.

The parish church is first mentioned in 1166; the building you see is neo-Gothic and was consecrated in 1901, but the bell tower and a side chapel are of the thirteenth century. Those bells have had a piece of music all to themselves: Franz Liszt composed the Glocken von Marling, the bells of Marlengo, taking his inspiration from a poem by Emil Kuh. The name of the village, on the other hand, is much older and much plainer: attested from the twelfth century as Marnea, Merningen, Marnica, Merniga, and stable as Marling from the fifteenth, it comes probably from a pre-Roman word, marra, which means a heap of stones. Above the houses stands Castel Monteleone, built about the middle of the thirteenth century; and the arms of the comune carry the red lion of the family that lived in two castles of the village until 1426. The local craft, beside the apples, is the making of crystal chandeliers.