Brennero

Neither from Roman times nor from the early Middle Ages has any name for the Brenner come down to us: in the Carolingian age the crossing was described simply as through the Raetian or the Noric Alps, and the village that stands here was still called Mittenwald in the twelve hundreds. Then, from 1288, the documents record the court of a certain Prennerius, and the place name appears for the first time as Prenner; a few years later the founder of that court is named in full, Chunradus Prenner de Mittenwalde, and it is from him that the place took its name. It became ob dem Prenner and at last Brenner. One of the best-known names in Europe belongs, in all probability, to a farm and to the man who held it. The pass itself is far older than its name: the Romans built a military road here in the second century, and the milestones found along the route carry the names of Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus and Caracalla; by the third century the branch of the via Claudia Augusta over the Brenner was the most important link between Italy and the Danube region. Between the tenth and the sixteenth century sixty-six German sovereigns of the Holy Roman Empire crossed here on their way to the pope in Rome, Frederick Barbarossa among them. The counts of Tyrol put a customs house on either side of the pass. And on the eighth of September 1786 Goethe crossed the Brenner and stopped at the Hotel Post.

The railway changed the village: to make room for the station and its yards, six hundred metres long, houses were pulled down; the first train left for Bolzano on the twenty-fifth of July 1867 at five past eight in the morning, a month before the official inauguration. With the trains came travellers and a certain level of tourism, a Grand Hotel at the Terme with its own railway halt, hotels at Colle Isarco; the First World War ended all of it. The treaty of Saint-Germain, in 1919, set the state border at the Brenner. From then on the village was the line between two states and between two language groups, and at its railway station, on the eighteenth of March 1940, Mussolini and Hitler met and there laid the basis for the options in Alto Adige. Despite that alliance, Mussolini had the Alpine Wall built precisely here, to protect the Kingdom of Italy from its ally: in the woods on either side of the village there are still the Italian bunkers of the Brenner barrier, and on the peaks above them the little barracks from which the frontier guard watched the enemy who was also the friend. From 1944, after the German occupation, most of the trains passing the Brenner were the ones deporting Jews to the concentration camps. Today the comune is a scattered one — the seat is not at Brennero but at Colle Isarco, which has three times as many people — and the opening of the frontiers took from the place the work that had justified it: in November 2007 a shopping outlet was built on the border itself, to give the village something to live on.