Selva dei Molini

The name of this village is its landscape, and the arms do nothing but repeat it: four firs for the wood and a wheel for the mill. Mühlwald is recorded as Mullenwalt from 1160 and comes from Middle High German mül, mill, and walt, wood: along the little streams of the valley there were many water mills. The name of the hamlet of Lappago, Lappach, explains itself as well: it comes from loup, foliage. The Italian names, instead, are much more recent — they were created in 1916 with the Handbook of the local names of the Alto Adige and introduced by the fascist regime in 1923 — and the arms with the firs and the wheel were adopted in 1967.

The first records of the community and its scattered farmsteads are of the twelfth century, and they all lead to whoever owned the land: the Benedictine monastery of Sonnenburg near Brunico and the Augustinian abbey of Novacella near Bressanone, which together with the counts of Tyrol were the biggest owners of the area and pushed the colonisation of these difficult heights. The valley, in the old days, was divided into Pimwerche, that is, tax and administrative districts. Round about are the Zillertal Alps: the Gran Pilastro passes three thousand five hundred metres, and with it the Ponte di Ghiaccio and the Punta Bianca. In the territory there are two artificial lakes, that of Selva dei Molini and that of Neves, and following their outflow one goes down the valley as far as Molini di Tures; at Lappago there is a Kneipp establishment. The church of Saint Gertrude was consecrated in 1838. Here more than ninety-nine inhabitants out of a hundred have German as their mother tongue.