Moso in Passiria

The place name is attested from 1288 and comes from the German Moos, which in these dialects means a bog. The Italian name is far younger: it was introduced under fascism, and it was not this one — until 1955 the comune was called Piano in Passiria, and only then did it become Moso, which is the German word italianised rather than translated. Today Moso is the comune of the province of Bolzano with the highest share of German mother-tongue population, and the comune of Italy with the lowest share of Italian mother tongue: more than ninety-nine residents out of a hundred declare German. Its arms, granted in 1966, carry three sharp white peaks silhouetted against a blue sky and green meadows, and the green is there for the name of the village.

From Moso one crosses into Austria by the passo del Rombo, the Timmelsjoch; and just before the pass there is a small defensive barracks. It belongs to the Alpine Wall in South Tyrol, and precisely to the Moso barrier: from 1939 Mussolini had bunkers built along this border in order to prevent, or at any rate to slow down, an invasion of Italy by the Nazis. Since 2009 that little barracks has been a museum, the Mooseum, and a tower has been built beside the bunker; together they hold a historical and naturalistic route through the Gruppo di Tessa nature park. The comune is a handful of small settlements with two names each: Plan, which is Pfelders, high up in a side valley under the peaks of the Texelgruppe; Corvara, which is Rabenstein, and Belprato, which is Schönau, up towards the pass; Stulles, Ulfas and Plata further south. Near Moso are the Stieber falls, which in summer, when the ice melts, carry a great deal of water. And the mountain moves: on the night between the eighteenth and the nineteenth of February 2012 a landslide of about forty thousand cubic metres came down at Corvara as far as the edge of the provincial road.