It is a museum built around one man: Ötzi, the Iceman, found in 1991 by two German hikers on the Tisenjoch, below the Similaun, at three thousand two hundred metres, a few steps from the Austrian border, and who lived fifty-three centuries ago, in the Copper Age. No other human body so old has come down whole, with skin, tattoos, the last meal in the stomach and everything he was wearing. In 1998 Bolzano gave him the former palace of the Austro-Hungarian Bank on Via Museo, and since then it has been the most visited museum in South Tyrol, with the queue outside the door even in winter.
What to see
Ötzi is seen through a small window, inside a cell at six degrees below zero and near-total humidity, the conditions of the glacier; he is small, dark, curled up, and people stand in silence. Around him, the equipment, and this is the part that astonishes: the copper axe with its yew handle, the oldest complete one in existence, which changed the date of the Copper Age in Europe; the unfinished bow and the quiver with twelve arrows, only two of them ready; the flint dagger with its sheath; the fire-lighting kit with fungus tinder; the bearskin cap, the cloak of woven grass, the shoes stuffed with hay that still work.
Then the story of the investigation, which is a detective story: the arrowhead found in the shoulder only ten years later, the wound on the hand, other people's blood on his things, the sixty-one tattoos on the aching joints, perhaps a therapy, the pollen that tells in which season he died. At the top the life-size reconstruction by the Kennis brothers, a man of forty-five with a beard and brown eyes who looks at you. The other floors cover the prehistory and history of the region up to the Carolingians, with the statue-menhirs and the Roman tombs, but almost no one gets there.
Visiting
The museum is on Via Museo, in the centre of Bolzano, five minutes from Piazza Walther and ten from the station, opposite the civic museum; own ticket, closed on Mondays except in peak months, and with online booking almost compulsory at weekends and in summer, because entry is by time slots. Two hours, with the audio guide in three languages. No photographs of Ötzi.
Our editors' tip
Book the first slot of the morning and go straight to the little window, before the room fills up: look at him for at least a whole minute, then go back up and do the rest calmly. And when you see the shoes, remember that a footwear expert rebuilt them and walked on snow in them: they held better than modern ones. The rest of the museum is the proof that he was not a savage, but a well-equipped man whom someone chased all the way up there.