This village stands at the mouth of the Val Pusteria, and its history is that of a gorge which can be closed. Here is the Chiusa di Rio Pusteria, the old customs post of the princes of Tyrol, which barred access to the valley just before the Rienza flows into the Isarco; beside it stands the monument recalling the baptism of fire of the Tyrolean imperial rifles in 1813. The same passage has been closed a second time, against an opposite enemy: before the Second World War the fascist regime had the area massively fortified to prevent Nazi Germany from reaching the Isarco valley, and at Rio di Pusteria two barrages of the Alpine Wall were built to defend the basin of Bressanone. The same narrows, watched first towards the south and then towards the north.
The German name, Mühlbach, is attested as Mulibah and Mülbach as early as the middle of the eleventh century and means simply mill stream. The Italian one is far more recent: it comes from the italianisation of the place names of the province of Bolzano carried out during fascism. The coat of arms, adopted in 1971, nevertheless goes on speaking German: it is a canting shield, with a mill wheel and a wavy stream that say Mühle and Bach, and below a donkey, standing for the pack animals with which goods passed through here. The share of inhabitants whose mother tongue is Italian, which in 1971 was close to ten per cent, had fallen below four by 2011. Beneath the village, in 2012, the vertical shafts of a hydroelectric conduit were cut into the granite: never before had anyone dug so deep into that rock.
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Near Rio di Pusteria
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