TO SPEAK OF an identifiable group of Italian palm donkeys is anachronistic: Italy did not become an independent nation until 1861. The Alpine autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige, where references to palmesels are most common, was part of the German and subsequently Austrian empires from the eighth century until its annexation by Italy in 1919. Known alternatively as Sudtirol (South Tyrol), the region is still bilingual. Even Verona, where the best-known Italian palm donkey can still be seen, was long subject to the cultural influence of the predominantly German Holy Roman Empire and, in modern times, belonged to Austria between 1797 and 1866. It might be more accurate, therefore, to speak of palm donkeys south of the Alps, but since all that I mention in this chapter were recorded or are still found in places now inside Italy, it is convenient to describe them with appropriate caution as Italian.

The earliest extant record of an Italian palmesel is found in an inventory taken in 1250 at the former Benedictine abbey of San Gallo in Moggio Udinese. The list of objects used in worship there includes “a wooden ass on which sits an image of Jesus Christ” (asinus ligneus super quo sedet imago Jesu Christi). Cornaiano (formerly Girlan) may have owned a palmesel made in the workshop of Hans Schnatterpeck in Merano in 1484. Bolzano (Bozen) cathedral also had a palmesel. In 1488, according to the chapter accounts, payment was made for “four wheels on the donkey and two new axles.” Further repairs were made to “the Palm Sunday ass” in 1512 and 1516. A late palmesel is recorded in Chiavenna, on the Swiss border, where a “sacred diary” of church festivities published in 1707 noted that in the city's Palm Sunday procession, members of the Confraternity of Santa Marta “led the statue of Christ the Saviour mounted on the foal of an ass.” The fate of these palmesels is unknown.

Three Italian palmesels, one of which has since disappeared, are known to have survived the Catholic Enlightenment. The Liber processionalis of the Collegiate Church in San Candido (Innichen), compiled in 1616, describes a Palm Sunday procession from the Romanesque collegiate church to the parish church and back. Unusually, the palmesel remained behind.