Ville d'Anaunia

The comune is new but the name is old: it came into being on the first of January 2016 from the merger of Nanno, Tassullo and Tuenno, and it is called this because in the nineteenth century that group of villages was known as le Ville and looked to the parish church of Tassullo. Its coat of arms brings together in a single shield the arms of the three former comuni. In the census of 2021 eight hundred and sixty-six residents, more than eighteen per cent, declared themselves as belonging to the Ladin linguistic group.

Within its territory lies the Val di Tovel, and at the head of the valley the lake they used to call red: until 1964, in the hottest months, its water turned red with the flowering of an alga, Tovellia sanguinea. Then it stopped, and the reason became clear only with the studies begun in 2001: the reddening depended on the organic load, nitrogen and phosphorus, that reached the lake from the herds grazing around it; once the way of keeping animals on the high pastures changed and the flocks all but disappeared, the alga stopped flowering. The first report of the red water came from the English explorer Douglas Freshfield, who came up here in 1864; local writers of the early nineteenth century say nothing at all about the colour, and praise instead the char that was fished there.