Meltina

In 590 the Frankish army came down against the Lombards and destroyed a series of castles, which Paul the Deacon lists one by one: Tesana, Maletum, Sermiana, Appianum, Fagitana, Cimbra, Vitianum, Brentonicum, Volanes, Ennemase, two in Alsuca and one at Verona. Of the people he writes a single, final line: «all the inhabitants they had captured were led away». That Maletum, in the prevailing opinion, is Meltina, and from it the name too would come, from the Latin maletum, that is an apple orchard. Not everyone agrees, though: Joseph Schwarz, priest and schoolmaster of the village and a student of local history, thought that derivation misleading and proposed the Celtic Maol-Dun, «mountain dwelling», pointing out that here the names of farms and fields are often Celtic — Perlifl, Znol, Lafenn — and that Celtic bronze brooches and bracelets have come out of the excavations.

The village stands at one thousand one hundred and forty metres, in a basin open to the southwest, sheltered from the wind and so sunny that in winter the weather can be milder than in Bolzano, nine hundred metres below. The communal arms, adopted in 1969, take up those of the Hafner family, who lived here and were granted them by archduke Ferdinand in 1523: a three-footed pot from which three lilies emerge. Getting up here, on the other hand, has always been a problem: in 1901 a lift was built from Vilpiano, in 1922 a funicular for goods, dismantled at the end of 1940, and only in 1955 did a cableway for people arrive — whose mountain station, however, is still far from the village.