Postal

The Italian name of this village was decided by no office: it is a German word worn down by use. Burgstall means fortified place, and in the documents it appears as Purchstal between 1217 and 1235, as Purckstal in 1325 and still as Burgstall in 1780; passing through people's mouths, in the Trentino dialect it became Postàl. It is worth noticing, in a province where many Italian names were invented at a desk: here the Italian came out of the German by friction, not by decree. The fortified place of the name really existed: the village was built by count Volkmar of Burgstall — ancestor of the Spaur counts — to defend the castle, which today is only a ruin. Around those two poles came the church and, much later, the school.

If you look at where the houses stand you read a story of water. The historic dwellings are all on a slope, because in the Middle Ages the valley floor was still marshy; then, with the drainage works begun in the nineteenth century, the wet ground became farmable and filled with orchards, and the centre of the village came down to the valley. On the arms, granted in 1966, there is a sparrowhawk at the instant it is about to take flight: it is the insignia of the Knights of Burgstall. Since 1958 Postal has been linked to Verano by a cableway, renewed in 2000 and then in 2017, which is reckoned among the most modern in Europe: a single person can operate it while keeping the whole route under video surveillance. As for languages, today three quarters of the inhabitants have German as their mother tongue and a quarter Italian; but in 1971 the Italian speakers were more than a third, and since then their share has slowly fallen.