Vandoies

The most telling thing about this comune is the way people named the places they live in. At Fundres, the village at the head of the side valley, the cluster of houses on the western slope — the one where the sun sets earlier — is called Schattseite, the shady side; the one facing east is called Sonnseite, the sunny side. Where the ground decides everything, the address is the exposure. As far as roads go, the val di Fundres is a dead end: it has no direct link with the comuni to the north and west, and the farms climb the slopes as far as the Walder maso, the highest one inhabited all year round. Only a small part of the municipal territory can be worked at all — less than eight per cent — while pastures and woods take up nearly three quarters of it.

Up at Fundres the pastures cover much of the usable land, and the largest alp, that of the Weitenberg, is managed collectively: it holds a portfolio of three hundred and seventy rights, that is three hundred and seventy shares of use in the hands of the valley's farms. It is the same idea as the regole of the Dolomites, only counted out in numbers. The way the land is worked, on the other hand, has turned over: until not so long ago, even high in the val di Fundres the ploughed fields far outnumbered the meadows kept for green fodder, and today the relation is reversed — grass has beaten grain. The language has stayed what it always was: at the last census more than ninety-seven inhabitants in a hundred gave German as their first language.