San Candido

San Candido lies beyond the Alpine watershed: the Drava crosses it, and the Drava ends in the Danube, so this comune — together with nearby Sesto — is one of the few in Italy that does not belong to the Italian geographical region. In 1918, when Tyrol was divided, for that very reason it should have stayed with Austria: it was assigned to Italy for military reasons, with two large barracks, and the border in the hamlet of Prato alla Drava brought customs, frontier police and carabinieri. The name is much older than the line that crosses it: it appears as India in 769, Intihha in 822, Intichingen in 1070, perhaps from a Latin personal name. The Italian form comes from the co-patron of the collegiate church; Ettore Tolomei, in his campaign to italianise the place names, had proposed «San Candido alla Drava», and the regime accepted only half of it.

Through here, which the Romans called Littamum, ran the road between Aguntum and Vipiteno, and fifteen milestones have been found in the Val Pusteria, a sign of constant upkeep: one, of the mid third century, is dedicated to a child emperor who died at eleven. The monastery was granted in 769 by duke Tassilo the Third of Bavaria to convert the Slavs, then still pagan, and for centuries the place depended on the diocese of Freising. In 965 Otto the First granted it immunity, which made the march independent of the empire, and on the fifteenth of July 1303 king Albert of Habsburg gave it the right of market. But when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the village tried to become a trading centre on the road to the Cadore and to Carinthia, the counts of Gorizia stopped it: they did not want a rival for nearby Lienz. In 1554 a great fire destroyed the whole place, which was built of wood. Today San Candido is a tourist town of the Dolomites, and the tennis player Jannik Sinner was born here in 2001.