How Was Merano Built

Merano is a medieval market town with a nineteenth-century resort grafted onto it, and the join is easy to see.

The Lauben

The arcaded main street of the old town dates from about 1300, laid out by the Counts of Tyrol on the same principle as Bolzano's: deep narrow plots behind a covered walkway.

The Gothic town

The parish church of St Nicholas, begun in the fourteenth century, has one of the tallest spires in the province; the Princes' Castle in the centre is a small late-Gothic residence left almost unaltered with its original furnishings.

The Kurhaus

Built in 1874 and enlarged in 1912-14 by Friedrich Ohmann in full Viennese Jugendstil, with a domed hall over the river. It is the single building that explains the spa era.

The promenades

The Winter and Summer promenades run along the Passer; the Tappeiner, laid out from 1893 by a local doctor, contours four kilometres along the hillside and was planted with subtropical species to prove the climate.

Grand hotels and villas

The whole quarter west of the centre is late nineteenth-century resort architecture — hotels, sanatoria and villas in a Habsburg idiom, much of it now flats.

The synagogue and the racecourse

The synagogue of 1901 was built by a community that grew with the spa; the racecourse, laid out in the 1930s, is a rationalist complex on the valley floor. Both are easily missed and both belong to the same story of a town that kept adding functions.

Thun's baths

The Terme Merano of 2005, a glass cube by Matteo Thun set in a park, is the deliberate modern answer to the Kurhaus and works better than most such gestures.