Monguelfo-Tesido

Every place here has two names, and the sources can date each of them. Monguelfo is Welsberg, attested as Welfesperch in the twelfth century: it means mountain of the Guelphs, from the castle of the Welsperg family, and the Italian name is a translation of it. Tesido is Taisten, written Thesitin between 981 and 984, and comes from a Celtic personal name. Novale is Ried, the cleared ground; Prati is Wiesen, the meadows; Riva di Sotto is Unterrain, the lower slope. And Monguelfo had a third name too for centuries: until the end of the seventeen hundreds people often called it Zell, or Zellburg, from a cell of the collegiate church of San Candido.

The oldest document is of 769, when the Bavarian duke Tassilo the third gave some lands to a convent: there Tesido is not the village but the stream, a rivo quae vocatur Tesido. The lords of Welsperg began their castle between 1126 and 1140, built a second one on the hill opposite which burned in 1765 and was never raised again, and buried their dead in a chapel beside the parish church; the house lasted until 1912, when the last count died. Then the borders moved several times. The word Alto Adige was coined in the Napoleonic years to name a new department, and was taken up later for the Italian name of the region; this valley passed to Italy after the First World War, was in the province of Trento and from 1927 in that of Bolzano. In 1929 the comune of Tesido ceased to exist, absorbed by Monguelfo — and only in 2003 did it take its name back, in the double name the comune bears today.