Naz-Sciaves

On the plateau of Sciaves, for a century, men were taught how to make war. The rolling ground was reckoned excellent for training the assault troops of the imperial Austro-Hungarian army, who here learned to build positions, to defend them and to storm them, and drilled for trench battles with hand grenades, explosives, mine-throwers, flamethrowers, knives and daggers. The units were billeted in the villages from Vandoies di Sopra to Rodengo and every morning reached the area on foot, marching. Later the Bavarian Alpenkorps trained here too, and during the war fresh troops passed through before leaving for the front: the last news of courses at Sciaves is from October 1918, a month before the end.

Then came the others. In the thirties the plateau was used by Italian soldiers; in that same period, with the building of the Alpine Wall, some forty bunkers were constructed in the area to block access to Bressanone. During the Second World War the German soldiers quartered at Bressanone trained here. After the war, finally, a NATO base rose here with the code name Site Rigel, used until 1983 as a depot of what the documents call «special munitions», that is nuclear ones, meant for the Italian artillery in case of invasion through the Brenner or the Val Pusteria. Today of all this only a few remains of trenches are left, because since 1958 a land improvement consortium has covered the plateau with apple orchards. On the coat of arms there is a heron's head: it was the insignia of the lords who lived in the village from 1147.