Rabbi

On the arms of Rabbi there is a golden cup from which water is brimming over, and it stands for the mineral waters that feed the baths. The comune coincides with its valley: the Val di Rabbi branches off the Val di Sole and climbs for some ten kilometres north-west of Malé, and the villages are met one after another as you go up — first Pracorno, then San Bernardo, which is the seat of the comune, then Piazzola and last Rabbi Fonti, which in dialect is called Le Aque and is the place of the baths. It is an alpine valley of wide pastures, woods, mountain dairies and farmsteads, run through by the Rabbies stream, which near Malé throws itself into the Noce; more than half the territory lies inside the Stelvio national park.

The oldest thing to be heard here, though, is the language. The rabbiese is a Rhaeto-Romance speech, classed with the Ladin of the Anaunia, and it has kept features that elsewhere have been lost: the semi-palatalisation of c and g before a vowel, which gives that strongly aspirated chj held to be common to all the old Ladin peoples, and a final vowel for the feminine that is written ô or å and is neither the Italian a nor the Italian o — a sign of how well this dialect has resisted Italianisation, better than its nearest relatives. There are the vowels ü and ö, and there are the consonant clusters typical of Ladin: plan for slow and planger for to weep, glesiô for church and glac' for ice, seclô for bucket and reclô for ear, blainch for white and sablon for sand. In the census of 2021 a little more than one inhabitant in ten declared themselves Ladin.