Nova Ponente

The name is the record of a border between languages. It appears as Nova in 1175 and as Nova Teutonica in 1209, from the Latin nova, land recently brought under cultivation, and teutonica: German-speaking Tyroleans lived here, while nearby Nova Levante — in German Welschnofen, the Italian Nova — was inhabited by Ladin-speaking Tyroleans. Today German is the language of almost everyone, and Ladin has practically disappeared: the distinction those two names record no longer exists.

The settlement came from the high-altitude colonisation of the age of Meinhard the Second of Tyrol, and almost all the farmsteads are first named in the great census the count had made in 1288. By 1434 the community was already acting on its own account: a judicial document calls it the people and community of Tewtschenofen and shows it disputing revenues with the noble Botsch family of Bolzano. Its wealth, from the Middle Ages onwards, was timber: in 1614 wood supplied by one farm here, the Tschufflerhof, was used for the roof structure of the cathedral of Bologna. The coat of arms, adopted in 1969, is the same inventory: white for the dolomite deposits, red for the porphyry, a branch for the woods.