Bolzano Culture

Bolzano is genuinely bilingual and is careful about it in a way that takes a visitor a day or two to notice.

Two languages, by law

Everything official appears in German and Italian, public jobs are allocated in proportion to the declared language groups, and children are schooled in one language or the other. It works, and it is also an administrative structure that people argue about constantly.

The city is the exception

South Tyrol as a whole is about two-thirds German-speaking, but Bolzano city is roughly three-quarters Italian-speaking, a direct legacy of the industrial quarter built under Fascism. Walk twenty minutes uphill and the balance reverses.

Ötzi

The man who died in a pass around 3300 BC, found in 1991 by hikers, is kept at minus six degrees behind glass in the museum. He has a wound, a copper axe, a last meal and a name, and the city has organised a good deal of its identity around him.

Food

Speck, dumplings, barley soup and strudel sit on the same menus as pasta, and neither tradition apologises. The Christmas market, running since 1990, is the largest in Italy.

Ladin, the third language

A fourth of the province's valleys speak neither German nor Italian but Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language with perhaps thirty thousand speakers in the Dolomite valleys, with its own schools, media and legal recognition. It is easy to miss from the city and it is not a dialect.

Wine

Lagrein and Santa Maddalena are grown on the slopes inside the city, and Alto Adige produces some of the best white wine in the country.