Situated on the junction of the rivers Talvera (Talfer) and Isarco (Eisack) near the southern limit of the province, BOLZANO (BOZEN) is Alto Adige's chief town. For centuries a valley market town and way station, Bolzano's fortunes in the Middle Ages vacillated as the Counts of Tyrol and the Bishops of Trento competed for power. The town passed to the Habsburgs in the fourteenth century, then at the turn of the nineteenth century Bavaria took control, opposed by Tyrolese patriot and military leader Andreas Hofer. His battle in 1809 to keep the Tyrol under Austrian rule was only temporarily successful, as in the same year the Austrian Emperor ceded the Tyrol to the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy. More changes followed, as Bolzano was handed back to Austria until after World War I, whereupon it passed, like the rest of the province, to Italy. Nowadays, in both winter and summer, the town is a busy tourist resort, and its pavement cafés and generally relaxed pace of life make it a good, if uneventful, place to rest up or use as a base for trips into the mountains. An unmissable pleasure is the local wine: Bolzano is at the head of the wine road , which runs south to the border with Trentino, and it's especially well known for its Chardonnay.
The Town
Central Bolzano definitely looks like a part of the German-speaking world. Restaurants serve speck, gulasch and knödel , and bakers sell black bread and sachertorte . The centre of town is Piazza Walther , whose pavement cafés, around its statue of the minnesinger (troubadour) Walther von der Vogelweide, are the town's favoured meeting places; with just a L10,000/?5.16 deposit you can borrow bicycles for use around town from here. Converted into a cathedral as recently as 1964, the Duomo (Dom), on the edge of the square, resembles a parish church: built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and restored after being bombed in World War II, it has a striking green-and-yellow mosaic roof and elaborately carved spire. The fourteenth-century Franciscan church on Via dei Francescani is also worth seeking out, embellished with a carved wooden altarpiece by Hans Klocher and with elegant, frescoed cloisters from the same period.
A couple of streets west of Piazza Walther, on Via Cappuccini, the Chiesa dei Domenicani (Dominican monastery) has frescoes of fifteenth-century courtly life painted on the walls of the decaying cloisters, framed by a growth of stone tracery. The Cappella di San Giovanni, built at the beginning of the fourteenth century, retains frescoes by painters of the Giotto school, including a Triumph of Death underneath a starry vault. Follow the street north to Piazza Erbe , site of a daily fruit and vegetable market, from where the oriel windows and eleventh-century arcades of Via Portici lead off to the right.
On the west side of the old town stands one of Alto Adige's more important museums, the recently opened Museo Archeologico (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm, Thurs until 7pm, www.iceman.it ; L10,000/?5.16), a ten-minute walk west of the centre at Via Museo (Museumstrasse) 43. Once the seat of the Austro-Hungarian National Bank, and then the Banco d'Italia, the building's four floors trace the region's history and developing culture from the end of the last Ice Age to the early Middle Ages, through exhibits, reconstructions, models and multimedia presentations. At the heart of the museum is the Iceman, nicknamed "Ötzi", the superbly preserved mummy of an early Copper Age male discovered in the ice of the Ötzaler Alps in 1991. Visitors can only view the mummy through a small window in a high-tech refrigeration unit, its preservation depends on remaining in an identical climate to the one in which he was discovered. At around 5300 years old, "Ötzi", his clothing, and his attendant possessions provide an unprecedented insight into the everyday culture of his time.
Continuing westwards down Via Museo takes you to a pleasant park alongside the River Talvera (Talfer). Bolzano's German and Gothic quarter ends on the other side of the Ponte Talvera, where Piazza della Vittoria signals the edge of the Italian town, much of it laid out by Mussolini's favourite architect, Marcello Piacentini. The epic triumphal arch on the square was commissioned by Mussolini in 1928 and is something of a controversial monument. Until a recent clean-up it was covered with graffiti and surrounded by low railings, and it was even bombed by German-speaking separatists in the late-1980s. The piazza is now the site of relatively sedate activity, hosting a big general market on Saturdays.
If you've time, follow Corso Libertà from the square to the leafy suburb of Gries, on the left bank, where the Gothic Parrocchiale in the main square, overshadowed by a Baroque church nearby, contains a richly carved and painted fifteenth-century altarpiece by Michael Pacher .
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