How Was Bolzano Built

Bolzano is built in two distinct pieces that face each other across a river, and the river is the argument.

The Portici

The arcaded street of about 1180 is the oldest thing here: narrow plots running deep back from a covered walkway, because merchants were taxed on frontage. The arcades are continuous for three hundred metres and are still where the city shops.

Tyrolean building

The old town is gabled, painted, bay-windowed and steep-roofed, built in porphyry and plaster, with the vocabulary of Innsbruck rather than of Verona. The Gothic cathedral has a filigree sandstone spire and a roof of patterned glazed tiles.

The castles

The valley approaches are guarded by castles — Roncolo, Firmiano, Mareccio — because this was the route from Germany into Italy and controlling it was worth a great deal.

The new city

From 1928 the regime built a wholly new quarter across the Talvera: rationalist blocks, wide axial streets, a monumental Victory Monument by Marcello Piacentini, and factories to employ the Italian workers brought in to settle it. It is architecturally serious and politically explicit.

Two difficult monuments

The Victory Monument carries an inscription about bringing civilisation to barbarians; since 2014 a permanent exhibition in its crypt explains what it was for. A vast Fascist bas-relief on a nearby building was defused in 2017 by projecting a Hannah Arendt quotation across it in three languages. Neither was demolished, deliberately.

Now

The city has built seriously in recent decades, with a museum quarter and some of the best contemporary architecture in Italy.