Tesimo

In the hamlet of Prissiano, beside Katzenzungen castle, grows the Versoaln: a vine held to be the oldest on Earth and the largest in Europe, and at least three and a half centuries old. It is worth doing the arithmetic: when that plant was already standing, the village was administered by the Frank family, who held it from 1551 to 1743 and whose insignia — a red five-petalled rose and an erect brown bear — ended up on the communal arms, adopted in 1966. The vine, in short, has watched masters, regimes and borders go by, and it still makes grapes. Tesimo is in any case a land of castles, and it has them all in excellent condition: Zwingenberg castle above the village, Wehrburg castle, Katzenzungen castle, Fahlburg castle at Prissiano, and downhill the ruins of Pfeffersberg castle.

The name of the village is very old and almost certainly pre-Roman: it appears as Tesana as early as the sixth century, then as Tisinum in 1153, Tisenum in 1194 and Tisens in 1297. The Italian form Tesimo, by contrast, is recent and does not come from usage: it was born with the Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige, the repertory that Italianised the province's place names and which for this village had also proposed Tisino. Another document says clearly how much the nearby city weighed: in 1302 the Bolzano leasing law is attested at Tesimo, the consuetudo terre Bozani quod vulgariter dicitur marchtrecht, that is the rule of Bolzano applied up here. Among the churches the most remarkable is San Giacomo at Grissiano, Romanesque, raised on a rock in the middle of the wood and decorated with twelfth-century frescoes of Old Testament scenes; since 2008 it has been a destination for pilgrimages by youth groups. The parish church of Santa Maria Assunta was instead rebuilt in Gothic style in the sixteenth century.