San Leonardo in Passiria

The village took shape around the parish church, attested from 1116 and then belonging to the Teutonic Order, along the old road linking Merano to Vipiteno over the Passo Giovo. On that road, where traffic was heavy, stood the Hofer family inn: and there, on the twenty-second of November 1767, Andreas Hofer was born. An innkeeper and horse dealer, he led the Tyrolean rising of 1809 and was shot at Mantua the following year. His birthplace, the Sandhof, is now a museum, with two commemorative chapels beside it.

The rest of his biography is less known. As a boy he was sent to Trentino to learn Italian, because his trade required it: he worked as a stable boy at Cles, in the Val di Non, and then for three years in an inn at Ballino. And the revolt he led broke out against very concrete measures taken by the Bavarian administration: mass conscription on the French model, the curbing of the Church's power, compulsory vaccination against smallpox. Above the village stands the manor of Jaufenburg Castle, seat of the lords of Passeier in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, whose emblem the municipality adopted as its coat of arms in 1969; and in the hamlet of Glaiten a small church keeps Gothic frescoes of 1380.