Prato allo Stelvio

The name promises a pass the village does not have: the Stelvio lies twenty kilometres further up, while Prato sits on the floor of the Val Venosta, at nine hundred and fifteen metres. The real name comes from the Latin prata, meadows, and is attested as Prada as early as 1187. In 1953 it was changed to Prato Venosta, but within a year they went back: it is one of those rare cases in which a decision about a name is undone almost at once.

The municipal arms carry three ears of wheat, in memory of when the local economy was built on cereals; today the fields are apple orchards, but in the courtyards of the old centre there still stand old Pala pear trees, a variety found only in the Val Venosta, which was once prescribed by doctors and sold in pharmacies. In the hamlet of Montechiaro stand the ruins of Lichtenberg Castle, of the thirteenth century, and where the Solda torrent joins the Adige lies the Prader Sand, a wild river delta with rare birdlife. In the middle of the village, the Aquaprad centre holds thirteen large aquariums with the freshwater fish of the province.