Rasun-Anterselva

Through Rasun di Sotto ran the Roman road that across the Val Pusteria linked the great arteries of the empire, and the milestones say so. One, found at the locality of Gosta, records a general refurbishment of the road carried out under Septimius Severus, in the year 201. Another, dedicated to Caracalla, was found in the eighteenth century and is now gone: what remains is the drawing made of it by the man who found it, and some believe they recognise it in a frieze built into the wall of the parish house. The modern road of the Pusteria, by contrast, was designed by Luigi Negrelli and opened in 1847; it passes through the area of Windschnur, where excavations have yielded finds ranging from prehistory to the Middle Ages.

Right there stand three bridges, one beside the other, and set in a row they tell two centuries of engineering. The oldest is the wooden one, lying below the other two: before 1847 the postal road ran over it. Then comes the stone arched bridge of 1847, and finally the one built by the Province in 2008, which runs almost parallel to it and which made it possible to restore the old one instead of pulling it down. The old bridge has been turned into a document: its approach is divided into three stretches showing three different ages of road surface, asphalt with a steel guard-rail, an older asphalt with a precast concrete balustrade, and limestone gravel with little stone walls, granite kerbstones and wooden beams. In 1997 Claudio Magris devoted to this valley and its inhabitants one of the stories in his Microcosms.