Nalles

In the autumn of 2005, at Nalles, a Roman house came to light, and since the spring of 2006 it has been under excavation. The village stood on the Via Claudia Augusta, the road that climbed from the plain towards the north, and that building was inhabited — so the archaeologists' first assessments say — as early as the sixth or seventh century before Christ. What was found inside says everything about the leap in civilisation: a bath complex and underfloor heating, with hot air circulating beneath a double floor. There was an apse too, and at the northern end a tomb left intact, with the skeleton of a woman of about twenty; among the grave goods were earrings and a string of glass beads.

At Nalles the dead show themselves under the church as well. The lower part of the bell tower of the parish church of Sant'Udalrico is more than seven hundred years old, and during the restorations of the nineteen nineties bones came to light beneath the building: today they can be seen through a marble slab set into the floor. They are the proof that in the thirteenth century the village was already populated; and that there was a living to be made here is said by two mines, from which silver was extracted. On the arms, granted in 1967, there are a black ox and a white swan: they are the insignia of the lords of Boymont-Payrsberg, who owned Schwanburg castle — the castle of the swan, which has some of the oldest cellars in South Tyrol — and Payrsberg castle, above the village, today reduced to a ruin. Nalles is the southernmost comune of the Burgraviato and has a particularly mild climate: vineyards, orchards and rose gardens abound here, so much so that they call it the village of roses. The name, for its part, is attested from the year 830 and is almost certainly pre-Roman.