Val di Vizze

The comune takes its name from the valley, which begins at Vipiteno and runs thirty-six kilometres north-east into the Zillertal Alps, up to the pass of Vizze, a broad saddle where there are deposits of silver, copper and lead and where people have been crossing since antiquity. Until 1920 two further valleys belonged to the comune, the Zamser Tal and the Schlegeisgrund: today they lie beyond the Austrian border. The coat of arms, adopted in 1969, is a small inventory of the place: a druse of rock crystal with three points, for the mines and the schistose rock; a silver horseshoe, taken from the arms of the lords of Trautson, who held jurisdiction here; and the green for the village of Prati.

The oldest document naming the place is a deed of donation of 827, but people were already living at Flaines and Tulves around the year 600. The name is written Phize in 1186 and Vitsch in 1288, and it is read either as a Latin word for a driven-in stake, crossed with the German word for a puddle, or straight from a Germanic term for a well. The map of languages here is drawn by the river: those who have Italian as a mother tongue, about one in eight and rising, live mostly at Prati and in the houses near the railway station, which belong to Val di Vizze but are in fact a quarter of Vipiteno, cut off from the rest of the comune by the Isarco — the same river that marks the boundary between the two. Near Wieden stands one of the barriers of the Vallo Alpino. And at Avenes a service window for the Brenner base tunnel was to have been dug: the people were against it, and the works were called off.