Travels thru Life: 6/25 -- Explore Bolzano, Iceman Museum, and Plose Mountain

We hopped on the train to Bolzano today to look around, learn about the German vs Italian situation in the South Tyrol, and to visit the Iceman Museum and learn more about Otzi, the alpine mummy discovered in September, 1991.

The train system here is easy to use and reasonably on time. According to Davide, if you book in advance, it is reasonably priced too. Bolzano (Bozen in German) is the home of the museum dedicated to the Iceman. It is also fairly large -- over 100,000 residents, with a pedestrian city center.

Our first stop was the Civic Museum for a lecture on the last 100 years here after the region became Italian. Leonard explained that the partition which divided the area called the Tyrol into North and South after WWI was not advantageous to the majority German-speaking community. Although 70% of residents spoke German as a first language, overnight, the German-speaking teachers were replaced with Italians, all classes were taught in Italian, and the German language was completely repressed. It was kept alive in underground schools and in homes, but German-speaking citizens were effectively barred from municipal jobs and had to conduct all their business in Italian. Over time, the laws were changed but the distribution of jobs to native Italian speakers continued. Finally, it was decided that the municipal job holders should reflect the proportion of German speakers in the area, and this is adjusted after each census, but it has remained pretty stable.

We got a chance to walk up to the top of the tower in the museum and get an expansive view over the city from each direction.

Then it was off to learn about Otzi, the iced in mummy found in 1991. At first, he was thought to be a local man who had died in the last 20 years or so, then maybe from 100 years ago, to 500-600 years. It wasn't until university staff got their first chance to analyze him more than a week later that they announced he had died from 5100 to 5300 years ago. Since his discovery, a lot of research has been done on him and his belongings, and knowledge increases each year as scientific methods improve or useful inventions appear. We now know what he ate and wore, that he was killed by an arrow, that he may have been a shaman and traveled around quite a bit. Some of the floors of the museum did not allow pictures, but one of my favorite areas did--a life-sized recreation of his probable appearance. Otzi was about 45, old for his time. He wore leggings, a loin cloth, and a coat that may not have had sleeves. He also had a grass cloak and a wolf skin hat.

Then it was lunch time, and hot out, making us not that hungry so we split a mini pizza and a coke and wandered around until it was time to go back to Brixen. We visited the church with the green roof we had seen when we first arrived and especially appreciated how much cooler it was in there. In theory, we have gotten adapted to being active outside when the temperature is in the 80s, but when it is pushing 100, we slow down a lot.

We took the train back to Blixen where there was a bus waiting to take us to a small ski lift gondola at Plose Mountain for a snack (Jim and I had the apple strudel) and a chance to see the Dolomites, which look totally different than the Alps. The air was much cooler -- though 10 degrees warmer than anticipated. We walked 4 miles or more on an undulating trail at 6600-7100 feet, visiting cows on the path and refreshing ourselves from the 90 degree heat at the cold water troughs along the way while ogling the Dolomites. Then we took the gondola back down and the bus to the hotel to cool off before dinner.