Villabassa

Between 1810 and 1813 Villabassa found itself in a situation that seems invented: it was a frontier town with three different states within ten kilometres. It still belonged to Bavaria; the next village, Dobbiaco, was in the Kingdom of Italy; and the one after, San Candido, lay in the Illyrian Provinces, administered directly by France. It had come to that by stages: in 1806, after Austerlitz and the peace of Pressburg, Napoleon had taken the whole county of Tyrol from Austria to give it to Bavaria; Bavarian misrule had brought on the Tyrolean revolt of 1809, led by Andreas Hofer and Peter Mayr; and in 1810, the revolt crushed, the treaty of Paris had cut everything up again. In December 1813 Austria took Tyrol back, and the Congress of Vienna recognised it.

Villabassa, in German Niederdorf, that is, lower village, appears for the first time as Nidrindorf in a document between 993 and 1005, and grew up around the parish church built in 1225. For centuries it was the most important post station of the Val Pusteria, with many craftsmen specialised in mending carts and carriages: the first postmaster, Johannes von Kurz, lived in the Wassermann house, which today holds the tourism museum of the Alta Pusteria. For here people have lived on tourism a long time: the pioneer was the innkeeper Emma Hellenstainer, and her hotel — the Black Eagle — is still open under her name. In 1871 the Val Pusteria railway arrived, and it is still working. Older than all this is a Roman milestone, found in 1955 along the road that joined Aguntum to Vipitenum: a column of quartz rock a little over two metres high, weighing half a ton, with a dedication to the emperor Decius, who reigned only two years.