Santa Cristina Valgardena

On the arms of Santa Cristina, adopted in 1969, there is a deer, and it is the emblem of the family of Primus von Dosses. The reason the village chose precisely that is neither kinship nor a fief: from 1636, beside the church of Santa Cristina, that family ran a table for the poor and the needy. A comune that puts on its shield the people who fed others is something one rarely sees. The name, on the other hand, tells a different story: attested as S. Kristein in 1277 and as St. Christina in Gröden in 1817, from 1923 to 1955 it was reduced by decree to Santa Cristina alone, because the fascist Italianisation had taken the valley out of the name; the Gardena came back to its place by a regional law of 1955. Today almost nine inhabitants out of ten have Ladin as their mother tongue. And on 17 May 1945, during the Tacoma sabotage mission, the Gardena killing cost five people their lives.

The houses of the village carry their dates written on them, usually on the wood or the stone of the entrance: on the lintel of the Fusell there is 1542, on the frieze of the Paratoni door 1761, on a rococo cartouche painted outside the Sigata 1786, and the barn of the Crëpa was built in blockbau in 1805, while the house itself is two or three centuries older, with the lower floor in masonry and the upper projecting in wood. The church of Santa Cristina and Sant'Antonio Abate is attested from 1343 and is among the oldest places of worship in the valley: little remains of the original Romanesque, but there are a Gothic wooden choir and a baroque altar. On Monte Pana, instead, there is a chapel of the nineteen thirties, the work of the Austrian architect Franz Baumann, who gave it a Bauhaus style adapted to the mountains. Not far off stands Castel Gardena, the seventeenth-century castle of the counts of Wolkenstein. Until 1960 the village even had a train, a narrow-gauge railway opened in 1916 that climbed up from Chiusa; today, in December, the World Cup downhill and super-G are raced on the Saslong.