The Talvera has divided Bolzano for a century: on one side the medieval German-speaking arcades, on the other the rationalist avenues built by fascism. In 2008 the museum of modern and contemporary art placed itself exactly in the middle, with a cube-shaped building that has two footbridges, one to each bank, and crosses the river like a hinge. It is the declared opposite of the Victory Monument five hundred metres away: a building made to join the two banks instead of marking them.
What to see
The cube has its two short sides in glass and its two long ones in perforated aluminium, which reflect by day and become screens by night: video works are projected onto the outside and watched free from the bridge, like an open-air cinema over the river. Inside, four floors hold the permanent collection and the temporary exhibitions, with a programme leaning towards conceptual art, video and installation.
The collection brings together Italian, Austrian and German artists, and the museum works a great deal on the theme of the border, which here is not an abstraction. Museion also looks after works scattered outside its walls, in the city and in the outer districts, where contemporary art is put among people instead of protected in a room. On the ground floor are the café and the bookshop, and it is one of the most used public spaces in Bolzano.
Visiting
The museum is on via Dante, just across the Talvera, ten minutes on foot from piazza Walther; ticketed, normally closed on Mondays, with one late evening a week at reduced or free entry, to be checked. An hour and a half. The atrium and the footbridge can be crossed without a ticket.
Our editors' tip
Come back after dinner and stand on the Talvera bridge: the projections on the façade can be seen from there, free, with the river below and the mountains behind. Then, if you feel like it, walk along the embankment to the Victory Monument: five hundred metres and two opposite answers to the same question, which is how to live in two languages in the same city.