Three days in Bolzano: the iceman is kept at minus six degrees just off the main square

Two nights where Italy stops speaking Italian, with a Copper Age body in a cold cell, a castle covered in medieval frescoes, and the Dolomites starting at the end of the valley.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Bolzano
Places
7 across 3 days
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In 1991 two German walkers found a body in the ice at three thousand two hundred metres, a hundred metres inside the Italian border. It turned out to be five thousand three hundred years old, with his clothes, his shoes, his copper axe, his bow and the contents of his last meal all intact, and an arrowhead in his shoulder that killed him. He is now in a museum in the middle of Bolzano, in a refrigerated cell at minus six degrees, visible through a small window.

That is the reason most people come, and it justifies the trip on its own. What they find when they get here is stranger: an Italian city where seventy per cent of the population speaks German at home, the street signs are in two languages, the bakeries sell strudel and the bars pull espresso, and every menu offers both dumplings and pasta.

South Tyrol was Austrian until 1919 and has been trying to be both things ever since. Bolzano is where the two halves rub together, and it is also the gateway to the Dolomites, which start about twenty minutes up the valley.

Highlights

  • A five thousand year old man, his coat, his shoes and his axe, in a cold room off the main square
  • The largest surviving set of secular medieval frescoes anywhere, in a castle above the river
  • A mountaineer's museum in a ruined castle, built by the first man up Everest without oxygen
  • Cable cars from the middle of town that put you on an Alpine plateau in twelve minutes

Where to stay

Bolzano, two nights

A market town founded at the meeting of two rivers on the road over the Brenner pass, which is the lowest crossing of the main Alpine chain and has therefore been the road between Germany and Italy for two thousand years. The arcaded main street was built for the merchants who used it.

It became Italian in 1919 when the empire was carved up, was subjected to a heavy-handed programme of Italianisation between the wars, and now runs as an autonomous province with its own tax powers and a fierce attachment to being neither one thing nor the other.

Day by day

Day 1 in Bolzano

The square, the market, and the first plate of dumplings

The old town takes an afternoon and is worth walking slowly. The main square is closed on one side by a Gothic cathedral with a green and yellow tiled roof and a filigree spire, and in the middle stands a statue of a medieval German poet that fascist Italy removed and the town put back.

Two minutes away is a small triangular square that has held a fruit and vegetable market since the Middle Ages, and still does, six days a week. It is the best place in town to buy speck, cheese and apples, and there are counters selling a glass of wine at ten in the morning to people who have just done their shopping.

In the streets around it are the arcades: two rows of merchant houses facing each other across a narrow street with covered walkways on both sides, built deep and thin because frontage on this street was taxed.

  1. 15:30

    Walter Square / Monument of Walther von der Vogelweide

    Visit

    The town's front room, with the cathedral on one side and cafes down the other. In December it is filled with the oldest Christmas market in Italy; the rest of the year it is where everybody meets.

  2. 16:45

    Fruit market

    Visit

    A permanent market on one of the oldest squares in the town, small and dense: apples by the variety, speck by the leg, cheese from the high pastures, and stalls doing a glass of Lagrein standing up.

  3. 18:00

    Maretsch Castle

    Other

    A castle in the vineyards a ten minute walk from the square, with vines growing right up to the walls. It is a conference centre now, so the inside is often closed, and the walk out to it through the rows is the point.

  4. 20:00

    Canederli and a glass of Lagrein

    Eat

    Bread dumplings in broth, or with butter and cheese, in one of the old inns under the arcades. Order the local dark red rather than anything from further south.

With more time: The monument on the far bank of the river, a fascist triumphal arch from 1928 marking the annexation of a German-speaking province, is one of the more uncomfortable objects in Italy. There is now a permanent exhibition in its base putting it in context, which is the only honest way to leave it standing.

Day 2 in Bolzano

Two castles: one painted, one full of mountains

A path along the river runs north out of town for about half an hour to a castle on a rock spur, and inside it is something almost unique. Most surviving medieval wall painting is religious; this is not. Two merchant brothers had the whole castle painted in the 1390s with scenes from the courtly romances they liked: Tristan and Isolde, King Arthur's knights, hunting parties, dancing, wrestling and bathing.

It is the largest cycle of secular medieval frescoes that survives anywhere, faded and damaged and still entirely legible, and it shows you what people who were not monks actually wanted on their walls.

In the afternoon go the other way, to a ruined castle on a hill at the mouth of the valley that Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb Everest without bottled oxygen, bought and turned into a museum about mountains and the people who go up them. It is as much about myth and fear as about equipment, and the walk around the ramparts has the Dolomites on the horizon.

  1. 09:45

    Runkelstein Castle

    Historic

    Reachable on foot along the river or by a shuttle bus from the centre. Take the guided tour if one is running in English; the paintings need somebody to point out what is going on in them.

  2. 12:45

    Lunch back in town

    Eat

    Speck, rye bread and pickled cabbage, or a plate of schlutzkrapfen, in one of the places off the arcades. Filling, and necessary before an afternoon of walking round a castle.

  3. 14:15

    Messner Mountain Museum Firmian

    Historic

    The main museum of the six Messner built, in a castle with the walls left as ruins and the exhibition threaded through them. Allow two hours including the climb up from the car park, and go in clear weather for the views.

With more time: The cable cars are the other way to spend this afternoon. The one to the Renon plateau takes twelve minutes and connects to a narrow-gauge railway across high meadows to a set of eroded earth pyramids with boulders balanced on top of them, and the whole thing runs on a normal transport ticket.

Day 3 in Bolzano

The iceman, and the train out

Leave the last morning for the museum, because you will want to sit down afterwards. It is three floors and it takes about ninety minutes, and it is very good: the clothing, the copper axe, the grass cloak, the birch bark containers, the reconstruction of his face, and the account of the arrow wound that was only noticed on an X-ray ten years after he was found.

The body itself is in a cold cell behind a small window at the back of one floor, at minus six degrees and ninety-nine per cent humidity, which is the closest they can get to the conditions in the ice. There is usually a quiet queue for the window and everybody who reaches it stays longer than they meant to.

The station is a ten minute walk, and Verona is an hour and a half down the valley.

  1. 10:00

    South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

    Historic

    Book a slot. Start on the top floor with the discovery and the archaeology, then come down to the objects and the body. English throughout, and the temporary exhibitions are usually worth the extra twenty minutes.

  2. 12:15

    Municipal Museum

    Visit

    The oldest museum in the province, a few streets away, with the local folk art, painted furniture and altarpieces that the archaeology museum does not cover. Half an hour, and it fills the gap before lunch.

  3. 13:15

    Strudel and coffee, then the train

    Eat

    Apple strudel made from the apples grown in the valley outside the window, and an espresso, which is where the two halves of this place meet. Then ten minutes to the platforms.

With more time: Merano, forty minutes up the valley by train, is the alternative last day: a spa town with an arcaded centre and, on the hillside above it, a botanical garden wrapped round a castle where the Empress Elisabeth of Austria used to stay. It is an easy half day and one of the best gardens in Italy.

Before you go

Where to stay

The old town, which is small: a couple of arcaded streets, two squares and a cathedral, all within four hundred metres. It puts you a few minutes from the station and from the cable car stations, which matters more than it sounds.

Bolzano is an expensive town by Italian standards and books out in December for the Christmas market and in summer for the mountains. The valley villages up towards Merano are cheaper and connected by a good local train.

Getting around

Everything in town is on foot. Beyond that, the useful transport is vertical: three cable cars leave from the edge of the centre and climb to villages on the plateaus above, each in ten or fifteen minutes, and they run on the ordinary transport ticket rather than as tourist attractions.

Trains run down the Adige valley to Verona in about an hour and a half and north over the Brenner into Austria. Merano is forty minutes. For the Dolomites proper you need a bus, a car or a tour: the passes are an hour or more away and the bus network thins out badly off season.

Tickets and timing

Book the iceman museum online, particularly in summer and around the Christmas market, when timed slots sell out. Nothing else here needs planning.

Most museums close on Mondays. The Christmas market runs from late November to early January and is the busiest time to be here and the best the town ever looks, at the cost of every hotel room in the province.

Eating and drinking

The food is Austrian with an Italian accent. Speck, cold-smoked cured ham, sliced thin and eaten with rye bread. Canederli, bread dumplings the size of a fist, in broth or with butter. Schlutzkrapfen, half-moon pasta filled with spinach and ricotta. And apple strudel, which is a local product rather than an import: the valley below the town is one enormous apple orchard.

The wine is a genuine surprise. South Tyrol makes the best white wine in Italy for its size, mostly Gewurztraminer from a village a few kilometres south that gave the grape its name, plus a dark local red called Lagrein grown inside the city limits. Almost none of it leaves the region.

Bolzano is a small town with one extraordinary thing in it and a great deal going on around the edges: a bilingual street sign, a wine you have never seen exported, a cable car that treats a mountain as a bus route.

See the iceman in the morning. Then go up.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Bolzano worth a trip for the iceman alone?
Honestly, yes, if you have any interest in prehistory: there is nothing else like him anywhere and the museum is excellent. But a day here and a day in the mountains above is a much better trip than a museum visit and a train, and the cable cars make that easy without a car.
Is it a good base for the Dolomites?
For a first taste, yes: the cable cars from the town put you on Alpine plateaus in a quarter of an hour, and the passes are within a long day trip. For walking or skiing proper, base yourself in one of the valleys, Val Gardena or Alta Badia, where you are at the foot of the peaks rather than an hour away.
What language do I use?
Either. Everything is officially bilingual and most people working with the public switch between German and Italian without thinking, and English is widely spoken. Place names have two forms, sometimes three, which makes reading a timetable confusing until you learn the pairs.
Is the Christmas market worth timing a trip for?
It is the oldest in Italy and it fills the main square from late November, and the town is genuinely lovely under snow. It also doubles the price of a room and puts a queue on every mulled wine stall, so decide which of those matters more to you.
When should I come?
September and October, for clear air, the grape harvest and the new wine festivals in the valley. June to August for walking, with hot afternoons in the valley and perfect weather two thousand metres up. December for the market. April and November are the two months when the mountains are neither one thing nor the other.