Bolzano Capital

The most famous man in Bolzano is five thousand three hundred years old: Ötzi, the Similaun mummy given back by the glacier in 1991, rests in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and is the visit that alone justifies the train ticket. Around him, a city that speaks two languages and lays two cultures on the table: merchants' arcades and piazza Walther, strudel and canederli next to espresso and ice cream. In German it is called Bozen, in Ladin Balsan.

The figure that catches new arrivals off guard: here the majority is Italian. Almost three residents out of four have Italian as their mother tongue and one out of four German, the result of twentieth-century industrialisation in a city that had been Austrian for centuries. Since 1990 its Christmas Market has been the most famous in Italy. The Renon cable car climbs in twelve minutes to meadows facing the Dolomites; the Messner Mountain Museum at Castel Firmiano tells the story of the mountains like nobody else.