Bolzano

Right now in Bolzano (as of October 2026)

• Christmas market: From 26 November 2026 to 6 January 2027 the stalls stand on Waltherplatz, right in front of the cathedral, and in several old-town streets. The market is closed on 25 December.

How long to stay?

Worth a rest day, just not on a Monday. Bolzano has three great medieval churches, all free to enter, plus the arcades, the Merkantilpalast and Ötzi, the most famous dead man in the Alps. The archaeology museum is closed on Mondays, except in July and August. And on the Jakobsweg Südtirol the stage from the Ritten through Bolzano to Eppan is 35.7 kilometres long. Spend the night in Bolzano, split it, and you have the old town to yourself in the afternoon.

Bolzano in Ninja numbers

• 141.9 kilometres separate Bolzano from the monastery of Müstair on the Jakobsweg Südtirol, according to Camino Ninja. A good half of the route is behind you.
• 914.7 kilometres take you from here to Rome on the Via Romea Germanica, according to Camino Ninja. From Bolzano, Santiago is not the only direction.
• 18 years two Swabian master builders spent on the cathedral tower, from 1501 to 1519. It is 65 metres high.
• 92.56 metres inside Italy is where Ötzi lay when he was found in September 1991. That is why he rests in Bolzano today and not in Innsbruck.
• 277,754 people stood in front of his small window in the archaeology museum in 2025.

Arriving: from the Ritten to the crossroads

On the Jakobsweg Südtirol you come from Unterinn across the Ritten plateau and through Oberbozen, 19.2 kilometres before Bolzano according to Camino Ninja. Then it is a steep descent over the Virgl, the hill above the town, where the Eisack and the Etsch meet. On the Virgl stands the church of St Vigilius, the oldest surviving church in the Bolzano area. From there, according to Camino Ninja, it is another 1.4 kilometres into town.

On the Via Romea Germanica you walk the same track from Neustift to Bolzano and come through Klobenstein, 17.6 kilometres before Bolzano according to Camino Ninja. Near Klobenstein stands the Kommende Lengmoos, where a hospice already stood on the road over the Ritten before 1211. From 1235 the Teutonic Order ran it for travellers and pilgrims.

If the Ritten is too much for you: the train runs through the valley between Klausen and Bolzano in half an hour.

In brief: a market under arcades

The Romans called a road station in the area Pons Drusi, the bridge of Drusus, and nobody knows exactly where it was. The name Bauzanum appears in the eighth century. In 1027 Emperor Conrad the Second gave the area to the bishops of Trento, and around 1170 or 1180 they founded the market settlement with the Laubengasse. Bolzano lay on the trade road from Augsburg over the Brenner to Venice, and fairs are documented from 1202. In 1635 the regent Claudia de' Medici created the Merkantilmagistrat, a commercial court in which German and Italian merchants sat together.

In 1277 Count Meinhard the Second of Tyrol took the town, and in 1363 Tyrol passed to the Habsburgs. After the First World War Bolzano went to Italy. The Fascists settled Italian immigrants here and built a new town and an industrial zone. Today about three quarters of Bolzano's people belong to the Italian language group and a quarter to the German one. Since 1964 the bishop of the diocese of Bozen-Brixen has lived here.

At the crossroads: two ways, two languages

Roads have always met in Bolzano. The Roman Via Claudia Augusta over the Reschen and the road over the Brenner came together here, and merchants from the north and the south did their business in Bolzano at the fairs, four times a year.

For you, Bolzano is just as much a crossroads. Since the monastery of Neustift you have walked on a track shared by the Jakobsweg Südtirol and the Via Romea Germanica. In Bolzano they part. The Way of St James turns west, through Frangart and Eppan into the Vinschgau and on to Müstair in Switzerland, towards the apostle's tomb in Santiago. The road to Rome heads south, along the Wine Road to Trento and on to Rome.

Language is a crossroads too. Every place has two names, and both are on the signs: Bozen and Bolzano, Eppan and Appiano, Trient and Trento. German gets you by here; a few words of Italian get you further.

Through arcades and cloisters: what to see

The old town is small. Cathedral, Dominican church, Franciscan friary, arcades and museum are close together, and the churches cost you nothing.

• The cathedral of Mariä Himmelfahrt: It stands on the remains of an early Christian basilica from the sixth century; a Romanesque parish church was consecrated here in 1180, and around 1300 the Gothic rebuilding in red and yellow sandstone began. The tower with its openwork spire is 65 metres high. Behind the high altar lies the Chapel of Grace with "Unsere Liebe Frau im Moos", Our Lady of the Bog, a Marian figure from the twelfth century which, tradition says, a carter found in the marsh by the Eisack. The cathedral keeps relics of the pilgrim Henry of Bolzano, who died in Treviso in 1315. Towards Waltherplatz opens the Leitacher Törl, the wine portal. The cathedral is open daily and admission is free (as of October 2026).
• The Dominican church and the chapel of St John: The Dominicans came to Bolzano in 1272. The pilgrim Felix Fabri from Ulm spent a night in their friary in April 1483, while the town was still smouldering after a great fire. The de' Rossi family, who came from Florence, had the chapel of St John painted around 1330 by artists from the Veneto who were influenced by Giotto's frescoes in Padua. In the cloister Friedrich Pacher painted from 1496. The chapel is open Monday to Saturday from 9:30 to 17:00 and on Sundays from 12:00 to 18:00, and admission is free.
• The Franciscan friary: The Franciscans have been in Bolzano since 1221. In the choir stands the winged altarpiece of the Nativity that Hans Klocker from Brixen carved around 1500. It lay in the attic for centuries until the friars brought it back in the nineteenth century. The cloister has frescoes from the school of Giotto. Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 17:30, Sundays 14:30 to 17:30, admission free (as of October 2026).
• Ötzi in the archaeology museum: The Iceman died about 5,300 years ago at the Tisenjoch, from an arrow in his shoulder. He was crossing the Alps like you, with a copper axe, a bow, a fur coat and lined shoes. He lies in a cold cell at minus 6 degrees, and you see him through a small window. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00, last entry 17:30, closed on Mondays except in July and August. Adults pay €13, reduced €10 (as of October 2026). Museumstraße 43.
• The Laubengasse and the Merkantilpalast: The arcades run for more than 300 metres from east to west, built in the twelfth century for the bishops' market. After the town fire of 1224 they were rebuilt in stone. In the Merkantilpalast, built from 1708 to 1727 by Francesco Perotti from Verona, the commercial court sat. Today the Merkantilmuseum shows the merchants' documents, paintings and furniture there. We could not find reliable opening hours.
• St. Georg in Weggenstein: The Teutonic Order came to Bolzano in 1202 and built a hospital where the Etsch and the Eisack meet; more hostels followed along the Brenner road. Its church of St. Georg in Weggensteinstraße dates from 1392 and still belongs to the Order. Open daily from 8:00, on Sundays from 10:00, until 18:00, admission free.

Food and drink

We found no reliable pilgrim tips for individual restaurants. Felix Fabri was already praising Bolzano's wine and sweet fruit in 1483. The Lagrein grape is grown in the district of Gries, and the Obstmarkt, the fruit market, grew up along the old town moat after the town walls were pulled down in 1277. For shopping, remember that South Tyrol is not a cheap place to be a pilgrim: reckon with €55 to €85 a day (as of September 2026).

Honestly

• Bolzano has no pilgrim hostel. There is no dormitory on the Spanish model, and the Camino Ninja database has no accommodation listed for Bolzano yet. Plan your night the day before.
• The descent from the Virgl is steep. After long kilometres on the Ritten, the hardest bit comes at the end. If your knees are bad, take it slowly.
• Without a stop in Bolzano the stage is too long. From Unterinn to St. Pauls in Eppan it is 35.7 kilometres on the Way of St James. Splitting it in Bolzano is the sensible solution.
• Ötzi needs planning. The museum is closed on Mondays outside the summer, and it gets busy in the season. Book online in advance.

Where pilgrims sleep

There is no pilgrim hostel in Bolzano, and the Camino Ninja database has no accommodation listed for Bolzano yet. The cheapest option is the youth hostel:

• Jugendherberge Bozen: Rittnerstraße 23, run by the association Jugendhaus Kassianeum. Book at bozen@jugendherberge.it or +39 0471 300 865. We did not find prices.

Otherwise there are private rooms and guesthouses. Under €50 a night is realistic in South Tyrol. On the Way of St James, St. Pauls in Eppan is 10.2 kilometres further on, according to Camino Ninja.

Ninja tips

• Listen to the carillon: Since 2010 the cathedral tower has housed a carillon of 25 bells from Innsbruck. It plays on Saturdays and Sundays at 11:00.
• Look for the pilgrim in the cathedral: Henry of Bolzano was a poor man who went to Treviso as a pilgrim and died there in 1315. His relics are in the cathedral. He is your town's pilgrim saint for one night.
• Sleep at Fabri's, at least in your head: Go into the Dominican cloister. Here, in 1483, a Jerusalem pilgrim from Ulm found a bed and early Mass before moving on south.
• Ötzi in the morning: Book online and come early on a weekday, and the queue in front of the window will be short.
• The train as a joker: Bolzano has a station on the Brenner railway. If you need to skip a day, take the train to Klausen, Brixen or Meran and rejoin the route there.
• Plan bilingually: Both names are on the signs. If the app says Bolzano and the signpost says Bozen, they mean the same place.

Practical tips for pilgrims

• Stamp: We did not find a fixed stamp point in Bolzano. Ask at the cathedral parish office at Pfarrplatz 27 (info@dompfarre.bz.it).
• Pilgrim passport and pilgrim groups: The Pilgergemeinschaft Südtirol is based at the Katholische Männerbewegung, Südtiroler Straße 28 (pilgern.suedtirol@gmail.com, pilgern.it). On 11 April 2026 it invited people to a star pilgrimage to Bolzano with a pilgrims' service in the cathedral.
• Mass: In the cathedral on Sundays at 10:00 in German and at 19:00 in Italian, at the Franciscans on Sundays at 8:00, in summer at 9:00, in German, and at St. Georg on Sundays at 19:00 in German.
• Money: Euro, as on the whole route up to the Swiss border at Müstair. From there you pay in francs.
• Getting there and away: Bolzano lies on the Brenner railway between Innsbruck and Verona. The Vinschgau railway links Bolzano via Meran with Mals in the Vinschgau, the valley the Way of St James follows westwards.

Onwards: west or south

On the Jakobsweg Südtirol you leave Bolzano heading west, through Frangart, 5.1 kilometres according to Camino Ninja, and Girlan to St. Pauls in Eppan, 10.2 kilometres. Then the route crosses the Tisner Mittelgebirge to Grissian, 26 kilometres from Bolzano. There stands the church of St James that Bishop Hartmann of Brixen consecrated on 12 May 1142, with frescoes from around 1200. To Müstair it is 141.9 kilometres according to Camino Ninja.

On the Via Romea Germanica you head south, via Montiggl and past the Kalterer See onto the Wine Road to Tramin, 24.5 kilometres according to Camino Ninja. To Trento it is 72.1 kilometres, to Rome 914.7.

Deep dive: merchants, pilgrims and a man from the ice

A long read, in case you want to learn more about Bolzano. About twenty-five minutes' reading.

Where two rivers and two ways meet

When you come down from the Ritten, you see Bolzano long before you reach it. The town lies in a basin, and the last metres are the steepest: over the Virgl, a hill at whose foot the Eisack and the Etsch flow together. On top stands a small church dedicated to Saint Vigilius, the bishop of Trento. It is considered the oldest surviving church in the Bolzano area. People probably already lived up here when the valleys became too dangerous in the restless centuries after the end of Rome.

Up to this point you have walked on a track that two pilgrim routes share. Since the monastery of Neustift near Brixen, the Jakobsweg Südtirol and the Via Romea Germanica have run side by side, through Klausen, along the slopes of Barbian, across the Ritten plateau. In Bolzano they part. One leads west into the Vinschgau and to Müstair, towards the tomb of the apostle James in Santiago. The other heads south, through Trento, Padua and Ravenna to Rome, to the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul.

That two pilgrim routes should part right here suits this town. Bolzano has always been a place where things crossed: two rivers, two great roads over the Alps, two languages, two ways of trading and believing. This text tells that story. It begins with the Romans and the bishops, takes you into the merchants' arcades and through the cathedral, follows a pilgrim from Ulm through a burning town, introduces you to a man from Bolzano who died a beggar in Treviso, and ends with the oldest walker you can meet in the Alps. He lies only a few streets from the cathedral.

A bridge of Drusus and a name from the eighth century

In the year 15 before Christ the Roman general Drusus conquered the Alpine valleys. The Romans built a road station named after him, Pons Drusi, the bridge of Drusus. To this day nobody knows exactly where it stood. Near today's cathedral there was a settlement of Romanised Raetians, and it was probably already called Bauzanum. The name is recorded in writing in the eighth century, and from it came Bozen and Bolzano.

When the Roman Empire fell apart, people moved from the valley floor up to fortified heights, probably including the Virgl. In the year 680 the historian Paul the Deacon mentions a Bavarian count of Bolzano. And in 769 Duke Tassilo the Third of Bavaria made a decision here that has something to do with your route. In Bolzano he resolved to found a monastery in the Puster valley, the abbey of Innichen. If you have walked the Jakobsweg Südtirol from its beginning, you passed it on your first day.

In the centuries that followed, much of the land around Bolzano belonged to monasteries in the north. Vineyards of the bishopric of Freising are recorded in 855, and Tegernsee, Schäftlarn and Saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg also owned estates here. The district of Quirein still bears the name of Saint Quirinus, the patron of Tegernsee. Early on, Bolzano was a place where the north came for its wine. From the twelfth century around forty castles rose in the Bolzano basin. Many fell into ruin, some became palaces, and you will meet one of them yet.

A bishop builds a market

In 1027 Emperor Conrad the Second gave the area around Bolzano to the bishops of Trento. They built a castle at today's Kornplatz to secure their power, and around 1170 or 1180 they laid out a market settlement in front of it. Its backbone was a long street with arcades on both sides, under which traders could spread out their wares. That is the Laubengasse you still walk today, more than 300 metres from east to west.

The location was ideal. Bolzano lay on the road that linked Augsburg with Venice over the Brenner, and here it met the old Roman road, the Via Claudia Augusta, coming over the Reschen Pass. Fairs are documented from 1202. In the same year the bishops of Brixen and Trento settled their markets in a treaty.

In 1224 the town burned, and 150 people died. Afterwards the arcades were rebuilt in masonry, with vaults. In 1277 Count Meinhard the Second of Tyrol took Bolzano, and from then on the bishops lost their power over the town step by step. In 1314 the Kuntersweg through the Eisack gorge was improved, and Bolzano became even better placed for trade. In 1363 Tyrol passed to the Habsburgs. In 1381 Duke Leopold the Third gave the town its coat of arms and a council, and in 1462 the bishops finally gave up their jurisdiction. The bishops' market had become a burghers' town.

The arcades and the fairs

Four times a year Bolzano became one great marketplace. From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries large fairs were held here, and with them came Italian traders too. In 1357 the Andreasmarkt was brought into town from Gries. The fairs mattered so much that they became a political pawn: in 1487, during the war with Venice, Archduke Sigismund moved them to Mittenwald, and they did not return until 1679.

With trade came wealth, and with wealth came pictures. In 1385 the brothers Niklaus and Franz Vintler, two Bolzano merchants, bought Runkelstein Castle. They had it painted, not with saints but with knights and lovers: King Arthur, Tristan and Isolde, Dietrich of Bern. Later Emperor Maximilian the First had the frescoes restored, and in 1893 Emperor Franz Joseph gave the castle to the town of Bolzano.

But the most important institution for Bolzano's merchants was a court. In 1635 Claudia de' Medici, a Florentine who ruled Tyrol for her son after her husband's death, created the Merkantilmagistrat. It was a special court for commercial matters, and what made it special was its make-up: German and Italian merchants sat on it together. Disputes between traders were thus judged by judges from both languages. The regent was meeting the Italian traders halfway and at the same time answering Venice, which had set up its own commercial court in Verona in 1630.

For this court the Merkantilpalast was built between 1708 and 1727 by the Veronese architect Francesco Perotti. The court sat in its richly painted hall of honour. Until 1979 the building housed the chamber of commerce, which had grown out of the magistrate. Today it is a museum, and when you walk through the arcades you pass right by it.

Knights who sheltered pilgrims

Merchants were not the only ones on the road over the Brenner. Emperors travelled it to Italy, crusaders to the Holy Land, and pilgrims like Felix Fabri, of whom you will hear shortly. There were hostels for them, and one of the first in Bolzano was built by an order that itself came from the Holy Land.

The Teutonic Order had been founded in the Holy Land in 1190. Only twelve years later, in 1202, its brothers came to Bolzano and built a hospital where the Etsch and the Eisack meet. More hostels followed along the mountain road to the Brenner. You may already know one of them. On the Ritten, at Lengmoos near Klobenstein, a hospice stood on the road over the mountain before 1211, a road that was then part of the imperial route across the Alps. From 1235 the Teutonic Order ran it as lodging for travellers and pilgrims.

That road over the Ritten is essentially your route. Only when the Eisack gorge was turned into a passable road after 1500 did the way over the mountain lose its importance. In 1525, in the Peasants' War, rebels plundered the commandery at Lengmoos and the Order's house in Bolzano as well. The building that stands at Lengmoos today dates from 1650.

In Bolzano the Order built the church of Saint George in Weggenstein in 1392, on the site of an old residential tower. It still belongs to the Teutonic Order, and on its left wall hang coats of arms, gravestones and banners of knights of the Order from four centuries. Above the high altar Saint George slays the dragon, painted by Martin Knoller.

A parish church that became a cathedral

For most of its life the cathedral of Bolzano was not a cathedral. It was the parish church of a trading town belonging to a diocese whose bishop sat in Trento. Only in 1964, when the diocese of Bozen-Brixen was created, did a bishop move to Bolzano. The cathedral chapter and the bishop's church in the old sense remained in Brixen. Bolzano became a co-cathedral.

Beneath the cathedral lies a much older church. An early Christian basilica stood here as early as the sixth century. Its remains were found only after the Second World War, when the bombed building was being rebuilt. In 1180, according to the Bolzano chronicle of the fourteenth century, a Romanesque parish church was consecrated on this spot, in exactly the years when the bishops were laying out the market. In Bolzano, church and market are the same age.

In 1259 Count Meinhard the Second acquired the rights to the parish, and the church became the memorial church of the rulers of Tyrol, first the counts of Gorizia, after 1363 the Habsburgs. Around 1300 the Gothic rebuilding began. It is made of two kinds of stone, red sandstone from Gröden and yellow sandstone from the Unterland. Its gargoyles and balustrades remind some people of Notre-Dame in Paris.

Take a look at the portals. The Lion Portal survives from Romanesque times. Towards Waltherplatz opens a smaller doorway, the Leitacher Törl, which in Italian is called the Porticina del Vino, the little wine door. It is considered one of the finest High Gothic portals in Tyrol. That a bishop's church has a wine door suits a town where monasteries in the north had their vineyards from the ninth century on.

Eighteen years for a tower

The tower is what you see from everywhere, even from the Virgl. It is 65 metres high and crowned with an openwork spire of tracery. It was designed by Burkhard Engelberg, a master builder from Augsburg. It was completed by Hans Lutz from Schussenried in Upper Swabia. A building inscription records that work began in 1501 and was finished in 1519. The original sits high up in the openwork spire, a copy on the south side where you can read it.

Two portraits of Hans Lutz survive, both in the city museum, and both show his tower. Whoever built a tower like this had himself painted with it.

Eighteen years for one tower sounds long. But it is a tower from a time when the town had only just come through one of the worst fires in its history. On 19 February 1483 a great fire destroyed large parts of the town centre. Eighteen years later the town began its church tower, and when it was finished in 1519 it stood over a town that had been rebuilt to resist fire better.

The Second World War spared the tower. It was restored all the same, from the mid nineteen-seventies until 1986. Since 2010 it has held a carillon, 25 bells from the Grassmayr foundry in Innsbruck. On Saturdays and Sundays at 11 o'clock it plays over Waltherplatz. You may climb it only on a few days a year, on guided tower tours.

What you see inside the cathedral

Inside, the cathedral has three naves, and much of what you see was rebuilt after the war. In 1943 and 1944 Allied bombs hit the parish church, the provost's house next to it and the church of Saint Nicholas, of which only the foundations remained. Frescoes, stained glass and the altarpiece were lost. The late Gothic sandstone pulpit was partly destroyed too. It dates from the same period as the tower and shows the four Fathers of the Church and the four Evangelists. It was rebuilt in 1949.

The high altar is Baroque, with many columns and figures of saints, made between 1710 and 1720. Since 1992 the main altar has held a relic of Saint Vigilius, the same bishop of Trento to whom the little church on the Virgl is dedicated. So the hill you came over and the altar you stand before belong together.

Behind the high altar lies the Baroque Chapel of Grace. In it stands a figure of Mary from the twelfth century, Our Lady of the Bog. Tradition says a carter from Bolzano found it in the boggy moss by the Eisack. Moos here means marsh, and there were many marshes around Bolzano. You will soon meet a pilgrim who complained about them. Look out too for the so-called Chattering Madonna and for the fresco of the Crucifixion on the tower wall, with Mary, John and Saint Barbara.

And then there is a figure that means more to Tyrol than to outsiders: the Sacred Heart of Jesus by the sculptor Johann Josef Karl Henrici, venerated since 1795. A year later, in 1796, when Tyrol was defending itself against Napoleon's troops, it became an inspiration to the defenders. A copy is still carried through the town in the annual Sacred Heart procession.

A count from Rome and a beggar from Bolzano

There are no relics of Saint James in the cathedral, and our sources did not mention a figure of him. But two pilgrims left their traces here, and both have something to say about being on the road.

The first was a count. Wilhelm the Third of Henneberg-Schleusingen was on his way home from Rome in 1480. He died in Salurn, which today lies on the Via Romea Germanica, 41.7 kilometres south of Bolzano according to Camino Ninja. In 1482 he was buried in Bolzano. Later his remains were moved to his family monastery of Veßra in Thuringia, but his gravestone stayed in the cathedral. His epitaph was made in 1490 by the sculptor Erasmus Forster. It is a quiet witness that not every pilgrim came home.

The second was the opposite of a count. Henry of Bolzano, whom the Italians call Blessed Rigo, was a man from this town who lost his wife and his son. Afterwards he went to Treviso and stayed there. He lived in extreme poverty on alms and gave whatever he had left to other poor people. He died in Treviso in 1315, and around his body, people said, miracles happened. The stories were so well known that Giovanni Boccaccio put them into his Decameron a few decades later, in the first tale of the second day. That is how a poor pilgrim from Bolzano ended up in one of the most famous books of world literature. His relics are also venerated in Bolzano cathedral, together with those of Blessed Johann Nepomuk von Tschiderer, who was baptised in this church and later became bishop of Trento.

It is a fine twist of this church: a count who came from Rome and a beggar who went abroad lie side by side here in memory. Both had set out on the road. Only one of them had money for it.

A pilgrim in burning Bolzano

In April 1483 a Dominican friar from Ulm came to Bolzano. His name was Felix Fabri, and he was on his way to Jerusalem. He later wrote a long account of the journey, and it contains one of the most vivid medieval descriptions of Bolzano.

Fabri came along the Kuntersweg through the Eisack gorge, which Duke Sigismund had had improved. In the past, he wrote, the road had been so dangerous that people sang mocking songs about it. When he reached Bolzano, he found a town in ruins. The great fire had raged in February, and when Fabri arrived it was still burning. The churches and monasteries had survived, but the Dominican friary where he meant to stay had caught fire too. The brothers had put it out themselves, up on the roofs. The prior, Fabri tells us, credited the rescue to the intercession of the Virgin Mary.

Fabri saw the fires as God's judgement and called the people of Bolzano a depraved folk, much given to drink, luxury and pride. That is harsh, and the editors of his account note that the verdict probably came from the shock of the disaster. For in the same breath he praises the town: everything was easy and cheap to come by, the wine grew splendidly, the fruit was sweet.

He did not find Bolzano healthy. On one side rose high mountains, on the other lay stinking marshes, and many people suffered from fever. He adds an anecdote: a stranger had thought Bolzano the coldest town in the world, because everywhere people sat about in winter coats. They were the fever patients. Fabri also saw the poverty after the fire. Many lived in the ruins, others left as beggars, and the town was just being rebuilt with more fire-resistant houses.

The next morning he heard Mass in the friary, had breakfast and moved on south. On his right he saw the river, and beyond it Tramin, whose wine was carried as far as Swabia. If you continue on the Via Romea, you pass right there.

The Dominicans and the painters from the Veneto

The friary where Fabri slept can still be seen, and it is worth it. The Dominicans are first mentioned in Bolzano in 1272, south of the town wall near the Eisack. Their friars probably came from the convent of San Lorenzo in Trento. The present church was begun around 1300, one of the earliest Gothic churches in Tyrol. In 1313 Anna of Bohemia was buried here, the first wife of Henry of Carinthia, the ruler of the land.

The heart of the church is the chapel of Saint John. It was founded by Giovannino de' Rossi, whose father came from Florence. Giovannino was buried here in 1324, and his son Botsch had the chapel painted. Around 1330 four or five painters from the Veneto worked here. They were under the spell of what Giotto had painted in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, and of his followers in Verona. You see the life of John the Baptist, the life of Mary, scenes from the lives of Saint Nicholas and of John the Evangelist. For a long time nobody knew about them. The frescoes were discovered only in 1915 and uncovered from 1935.

In the cloister, from 1496, Friedrich Pacher, a painter from the Puster valley, painted scenes from the life of Mary and the Passion. In 1784 Emperor Joseph the Second dissolved the friary. It became a barracks, a military store, a bakery and a school. In the First World War it housed a military hospital, where the doctor Lorenz Böhler gained experience that shaped accident surgery. In 1944 bombs destroyed the church and the tower. Rebuilding began in 1960, and the restoration was not finished until 2008. Today the Italian-speaking congregation worships here, and the former friary houses the conservatory. So Bolzano's crossroads show in this building too: a Florentine family, painters from the Veneto, a man from the Puster valley in the cloister and Italian Masses today.

The Franciscans and the altar in the attic

The Franciscans have been in Bolzano even longer. As early as 1221, five years before the death of Saint Francis, they settled here. Their first church is recorded in 1237 and burned down soon afterwards. The church and friary as you see them today date mostly from the first half of the fourteenth century, the vaults from the fifteenth. In the chapel of Saint Erhard people say that the young Francis visited it with his father, a cloth merchant. It is a legend, but one that suits a trading town.

What stands out is what is missing. High altars and rood screen were removed as early as 1790, and the walls are almost bare. All the more does what remains shine: in the choir stands the winged altarpiece that Hans Klocker from Brixen carved around 1500. It shows the Nativity. And it has a story you might like. For centuries it lay in the friary attic. Only in the nineteenth century did the friars bring it down and put it back in its place.

In the cloister you will find Gothic frescoes from the school of Giotto, painted between 1330 and 1340, in the same years as the chapel of Saint John at the Dominicans. There are also thirteen oil paintings from 1719. Admission is free.

The man from the ice

On 19 September 1991 two holidaymakers from Germany, Helmut and Erika Simon, were walking across a glacier in the Ötztal Alps, at a good 3,200 metres, near the Tisenjoch. In the ice they saw a body. They took it for a mountaineer who had recently had an accident. He was 5,300 years old.

On 22 September the dead man was recovered, and the next day he was taken to Innsbruck. The archaeologist Konrad Spindler examined him on 24 September and, from the shape of his axe, put him at least four thousand years old. Later measurements dated his death to between about 3239 and 3105 before Christ, in the early Copper Age.

Then came a question that was anything but prehistoric: whom does he belong to? The site lay right on the border between Austria and Italy, which the Treaty of Saint-Germain had placed on the watershed in 1919, and on a glacier a watershed is hard to find. In October 1991 the site was surveyed. The result: the man had lain 92.56 metres inside Italy. That is why he is in Bolzano today.

The finders had their dispute too. Under Italian law they were entitled to a share of the find's value. In 1994 they were offered a symbolic reward of ten million lire, about €5,200, which they refused. Only in 2006 did a court confirm that they were the discoverers, and in 2008 the province of South Tyrol settled with Erika Simon for €150,000. The press gave him the name Ötzi, after the Ötztal Alps.

What Ötzi carried

Ötzi was about 45 years old, about 1.60 metres tall, and weighed around 50 kilos. He was crossing the mountains, and what he carried may look familiar to you, only in an older model. He wore a fur cap, a fur coat, leggings and a loincloth of leather, and lined shoes. On his back he had a carrying frame, plus containers of birch bark, a dagger with a flint blade, an unfinished bow and a quiver with fourteen arrows. And he had an axe with a blade of almost pure copper on a haft of yew, the oldest fully preserved copper axe in the world. The copper, according to a study from 2017, came from southern Tuscany. Even 5,300 years ago, things came over the Alps from the south.

On his skin 61 tattoos were found, short black lines and crosses, most of them near the spine and the joints. They are thought to have been meant to relieve pain, something like an early form of acupuncture. His last meal consisted of ibex and red deer meat, einkorn and, mysteriously, bracken, which is actually poisonous.

For a long time people believed he had frozen to death. Only in 2001 did X-rays show an arrowhead in his left shoulder. The arrow had hit an important artery, and he probably bled to death quickly. An older cut on his hand points to a fight a few days earlier. Ötzi was murdered, on his way across the mountains.

Since 28 March 1998 he has lain in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, in a bank building from Habsburg times. He rests in a cold cell at minus 6 degrees and almost total humidity, on a precision scale, and is regularly sprayed with sterile water. You see him through a small window. In 2025, 277,754 people stood in front of it, and almost seven million since the opening. A new museum is planned, about 500 metres away. When this text was written, in the autumn of 2026, there was still no date for it.

The question that remains: what language does Bolzano speak?

In 1483 Felix Fabri wrote something else about Bolzano that still echoes today. The town, he claimed, had been Italian only a few years before. In the friary he had met an Italian father who knew no German. The editors of his account, in Innsbruck in 1923, clearly contradict him. They point to archive findings: mayors, judges, parish priests and heads of religious orders had German names, the streets had German names, the documents were in Latin or German. The Italian father was probably a chaplain for the foreign merchants during the fairs.

Who is right? The honest answer is that both saw something. In the Middle Ages Bolzano was a town of German-speaking burghers, but also a town to which Italians came to trade and in which a Florentine family like the de' Rossi had a chapel painted. The Merkantilmagistrat of 1635, with its German and Italian judges, was the answer to precisely this mix.

In the twentieth century the mix became a struggle. In 1919 South Tyrol went to Italy. The Fascists settled Italian immigrants, built a new town and from 1935 an industrial zone, and pursued Italianisation. In 1928 they inaugurated a Victory Monument by the architect Marcello Piacentini, a triumphal arch commemorating the First World War. The monument to the poet Walther von der Vogelweide, set up by Heinrich Natter in 1889 on the square in front of the cathedral, was moved to the edge of town. In 1939, in the Option, German-speaking South Tyroleans had to choose whether to emigrate to the German Reich or to stay and become Italians.

The conflict still has after-effects today, but it has changed its form. In 1981 Walther returned to his square. In the late nineteen-nineties the town renamed Victory Square as Peace Square, and after a referendum in 2003 it was Victory Square again. Instead of tearing the monument down, in 2014 a documentary exhibition on Fascism and National Socialism was installed inside it. In the 2024 census, 74.71 per cent of people in Bolzano gave Italian as their language, 24.74 per cent German and 0.55 per cent Ladin.

You do not have to settle this question. But you can notice in which language the baker greets you, the woman in the church, the man at the bus stop. In Bolzano the answer is different every day.

Bombs, a camp and a new bishop

The Second World War came late to Bolzano, but hard. After Italy's armistice in 1943 the National Socialists ran South Tyrol directly. From September 1943 to February 1945 the Allies flew thirteen raids on the town, aimed above all at the Brenner railway. About 200 people died, and 335 buildings were completely destroyed. The bombs hit the cathedral, the Dominican church and the town theatre.

In the summer of 1944 the SS set up a transit camp in Bolzano. In the ten months until liberation at the beginning of May 1945, about eleven thousand people passed through it, mostly political opponents, as well as Jews and Roma. About 3,500 were deported to other camps, to Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. Jews from Bolzano, too, were deported and murdered. Since 2015, stumbling stones in the town have remembered them.

After the war renewal came slowly. In 1946 an agreement between Austria and Italy promised German speakers equal rights and self-government. In 1964 the diocese of Bozen-Brixen was created, covering all of South Tyrol, and its bishop moved to Bolzano. A new statute of autonomy followed in 1971, and in 1992 Austria and Italy declared their dispute over it settled. In 1997 the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano was founded, teaching in German, Italian and English.

The pilgrims return

The fairs are long gone. By around 1800 they had shrunk to provincial markets, and in 1851 the Merkantilmagistrat became the chamber of commerce. With the railway to Verona in 1859 and over the Brenner in 1867 came travellers who no longer walked and no longer traded, but came to look. Goethe had already stopped in Bolzano in 1786; like Emperor Joseph the Second and Johann Gottfried Herder, he stayed at the Sonnenwirt inn on the Obstmarkt.

Pilgrims on foot came back late, but they came. Today the Jakobsweg Südtirol runs from the Austrian border through the Puster and Eisack valleys, over the Ritten to Bolzano and on through the Vinschgau to Müstair. The Via Romea Germanica, the old road to Rome from Stade on the Elbe, comes over the Brenner, shares the track with the Way of St James as far as here and then heads south. And for 11 April 2026 the Pilgergemeinschaft Südtirol invited people to a star pilgrimage to Bolzano: groups from all over South Tyrol were to walk into town from Tramin and Eppan, from Sterzing and Meran, from the Sarntal and from Brixen by way of the monastery of Säben. In the afternoon a pilgrims' service with Bishop Ivo Muser was scheduled in the cathedral.

So the cathedral where a count on his way home from Rome was once buried is again a place where pilgrims arrive.

What Bolzano gives you

Bolzano is not a town that holds on to you. It was never a destination, always a place in between, where people arrived, traded, slept and moved on. The merchants came four times a year and left again. Felix Fabri stayed one night. The count of Henneberg stayed longer than he meant to. Henry of Bolzano went away and came back only as a relic.

And then there is the man in the museum, the oldest walker you can meet in the Alps. He had shoes that were lined, a coat, a knife, containers of bark and lines on his skin that were probably meant to ease pain. He was crossing a pass, and he never arrived. When you stand in front of his window, with your own blisters and your own rucksack, the distance of 5,300 years suddenly does not seem so great.

Bolzano asks you the question every crossroads asks: where now? West to the scallop shell or south to Saint Peter's. Perhaps the question was settled for you long ago. Then take from this town what it has practised for more than eight hundred years: that you can live in two languages, that strangers can find justice under arcades, and that after a fire you rebuild the town in stone. It is still 141.9 kilometres to Müstair.