Terlano

The name is a gate. It appears as Torilan in 923, in a deed of the archbishops of Salzburg, and probably comes from the German terl, gate: which is exactly what the coat of arms shows, an open two-leaved gate, merloned, on a red field. Those arms belong to the von Niedertor, that is «low gate», the Bolzano family who bought the castle in 1397 and ran the village until 1559, helping to build the parish church: the pun works twice.

Under the parish church lie the remains of a Roman house and necropolis, and above all the early Christian baptistery of the fourth century, a unique witness to the first spread of Christianity in what is now South Tyrol. Above ground, the church holds the largest cycle of Gothic frescoes in the province; its bell tower, seventy-five metres, was taken apart and rebuilt at the end of the nineteenth century because over the centuries it had leaned too far. The mountain, for its part, gave silver: in the fifteenth century about a thousand miners dug galena in more than thirty mines, and field names like Silberleiten still say so.