Valdaora

The comune is made of three villages on one slope — Valdaora di Sopra, di Mezzo and di Sotto — and the coat of arms is their map. On a silver field runs a green band, which is the slope, and on the band sit three golden cart wheels, one for each village, set out in the order in which they really stand. Adopted in 1968, it is a coat of arms that draws the territory instead of symbolising it. The name is much older: attested as Ôlaga at the end of the tenth century, it would come from the Celtic Aulaga, that is the property of an Aulos, or from a word meaning «court». Valdaora di Mezzo appears as Mittirnôlag in a codex of the Bavarian monastery of Weihenstephan.

Along the southern edge of the comune, on the Passo Furcia, runs the linguistic border between the German-speaking area and the Ladin one, and the source also says when it settled there: in the Middle Ages. On this side German is spoken — at the last census more than ninety-five inhabitants in a hundred — and on that side Ladin, and the line has held for centuries at a point where the mountain already separates. Valdaora too, like other places in South Tyrol, was fortified during the fascist period: the Rasun-Valdaora barrier of the Alpine Wall runs here. And here, it seems, a farmer invented the Böckl: a kind of sledge made from a single ski with a stool mounted on top.