Main menu:
HISTORY
The term South Tyrol was born for the first time in 1919.
Until then, this area was part of the whole Tyrol land, which king Maximilian had bought from Austria around 1500.
Before then, the Baiuvari and German kings were the protagonists of its history. More than likely, men used to live in the valleys of south Brennero in pre-historic times.
The oldest marks were lost in the Bronze Age.
Encampments of hunters, dated to the Mesolithic (6000 4500 B.C.) Era, have been discovered in the mountain pass of Rolle.
In Appiano, stone graves dated 2000 B.C. have been found as well. We believe that stable settlements took place in valleys, from where hunters departed to search for food. Researches have proven that the climate was probably even more favorable then than it is now.
In the Stone Age, around 1500 B.C., men abandoned the middle mountains to go to the higher peaks in search of copper in the Aurina and Isarco Valleys.
Even today, we can find in Alto Adige, signs of the Hallstatts epoch; it is the last step of the central-European age of Iron (750 450 B.C.).
In general, more than 800 settlements of the pre-Roman era belonging to a variety of folks, races, languages and dialects have been discovered in Alto Adige.
New people came to this land before every change of epoch; the first were the Celtic.
The Cimbri came in 113 B.C., and stayed until the land got conquered by the Romans in 102 B.C. Once there, the Romans gathered all the different folks together in order to create one big folk called Reti.