Valle di Casies

Here the comune is the valley: the territory corresponds exactly to the Val Casies, which climbs from Monguelfo almost to the Austrian border, and the villages inside it come in pairs — Colle di dentro and Colle di fuori, Santa Maddalena Valbassa and Vallalta, Planca di Sotto and Planca di Sopra. Inside and outside, above and below: that is how you say where you are here. The comune proper was born in 1929 from the merger of Colle, San Martino and Santa Maria Maddalena, and it has moved its own seat twice: the offices were built at Durna in Selva in 1953, the seat stayed at Colle until 1985 and then went to San Martino. The name is attested from the twelfth century and comes probably from the German for settling, or else from a word for the din of a hunt. The coat of arms carries two black scrapers on a gold field: they were the insignia of the lords of Gsies, known from the thirteenth century and extinct in 1429.

At San Martino was born Joachim Haspinger, the Capuchin who was one of the hinges of the Tyrolean rising together with Andreas Hofer, against the Bavarians allied to Napoleon's French; on the main square stands his bronze statue, the work of Othmar Winkler. Between Colle and San Martino, out in the fields, stand some bunkers of the Planca di Sopra barrier, part of the Alpine Wall built along this frontier. In winter the valley lays out some forty kilometres of cross-country tracks, and every February a long-distance race is run on them; in 1994 the world championships of natural-track luge were held here. Beyond Santa Maddalena the forest roads turn into sledge runs. Here almost everyone has German as their first language.