How 'Bout Them Apples?

This was mostly a driving day. But we stopped for a tour of an apple orchard. We have seen these orchards along the highways as we've traveled. Today we got to see one up close.

Apple trees a grown very differently here than in the U.S. They are carefully pruned and supported by wires, much in the way that grape vines are. This makes it much easier to reach the apples and allows many trees to be grown close together in rows.

Of course, smaller trees mean fewer apples. But our host explained that this is preferred. In fact, they take steps to reduce the number of blossoms that are allowed to grow into fruit so that each individual apple will get more support from the roots and will grow larger. The goal is to get about 100 apples from each tree each year.

After our walk through the orchard, where we saw pears grown in much the same way as the apples, and cherries grown on trees in a manner more like we would expect in North America, we returned to the farmhouse for an apple tasting.

Then we were served lunch, much of it made from things produced on the farm, but surprisingly, no apple dishes.

Following lunch, we drove another two hours to get to our final hotel. This was described to us as a Venetian villa with beautiful grounds. It turns out to be just another hotel, but with a bit of lawn between the front of the building and the busy highway. It's not out in a rural area. In fact, there is a strip mall next door.

A fallow farm field makes for quite a crop of dandelions!

The two of us walked the neighborhood a bit, but it's just a residential neighborhood in the suburbs of Venice. We decided that it could be Blaine or Fridley!

We gathered in the bar for our farewell drink, and then had our farewell dinner in the hotel restaurant. It has to be that way, because there is really nothing else around here but a few pizza joints. We have to be up before 3 a.m. tomorrow morning to catch our flight home, so we won't be here very long.

Val Badia

After two days of clouds, we awoke this morning to bright sunshine and clear, blue skies. For the first time, we could see the snow-capped Dolomites through the. windows as we ate breakfast.

A coach took us about an hour's drive into the mountains with spectacular views all the way. Entering Parco Naturale Puez Odle, we stopped at a rather prosperous-looking ski village where we met Manuella, a member of the Ladin community. 

Ladin is a language distinct from Italian or German. Its Latin roots go back to Roman times, but it is a synthesis of Latin and an ancient local language. The Ladins as an ethnic group were here long before other ethnic groups, but only about 35,000 Ladin speakers remain. Almost all of them continue to reside in three valleys in the Dolomites.

Manuella took us on the longest, slowest nature walk ever. She was incapable of talking and walking at the same time, so we stopped every few feet. Since we aren't into botany or homeopathic medicines, her trivia about wildflowers was frustratingly excessive. The scenery was gorgeous, but we could have seen so much more of it had we moved along.

Finally back on the bus, we drove on through breathtaking mountains to the next valley, Val Gardena, which is also inhabited primarily by Ladins. Because the road was too narrow for the coach, we were dropped about a quarter mile from our destination, a Ladin "masso" or traditional farmhouse.

Klaus, our host, explained that the house is more than 400 years old and has been in his family for ten generations. Four generations live there now: Klaus's father, Klaus and his wife, two of their daughters, and four of his grandchildren.

Before modern development came to the valley (the ski industry has made these valleys very prosperous), it was home to four unrelated Ladin families with a total of up to 44 persons. Families lived communally in order to survive the harsh mountain winters and to eke out a living by farming in the short growing season.

To this day, Klaus explained through our tour leader's translation, he and his family follow the Ladin tradition of only eating meat twice a year, when animals are slaughtered. In between, the diet is primarily potatoes, cabbage, and hard bread.

Our meal featured these ingredients, which sounds pretty awful, but was actually very good and very filling. We sat at large wooden tables in one of two large rooms, or "stubbe," on the main floor.

Among the unique features of the masso was a large stone oven built into the kitchen wall. Another was lots of wood carvings, including a large crucifix in the corner of the room (most Catholics place these on a wall, not in a corner) and a wooden dove (symbolizing the Holy Spirit) "flying" on the ceiling in the center of the room.

Back on the bus, we returned to Brixen where about half the group got off at an Augustinian abbey on the north end of town. While the rest of the group remained on the bus and returned to the hotel, those of us who went to the abbey had to move quickly. We only had a half hour until closing time!

The abbey, established in 1142 C.E., was a large complex of Medieval and Renaissance buildings. The cloister featured well-preserved frescoes, and took us to a door marked "basilica." 

Behind that door was a most amazing Baroque church. Sadly, we had to rush through quickly, but some of the side altars were more ornate than the main altars in some cathedrals we have visited. The main altar was almost overwhelming.

From there, we rushed through the abbey museum, which filled many rooms and included artworks of impressive quality. A library and a large room that had probably been a scriptorium were near the end of the tour.

The abbey was preparing several different displays that would be part of the WaterLights Festival beginning in Brixen this evening. We got to see a few of them in preview mode, which was very cool. But it also meant that the scriptorium was very dark as the lights were being adjusted.

This abbey has long been famous for its vineyards and wines, and the wine shop remained open after the abbey itself had closed to visitors. They had an automated system for wine tasting. One purchased a plastic card for whatever amount desired, and then inserted the card into a machine in order to select a wine to taste. The machine distributed a taste into your glass and deducted a half Euro, Euro, or two Euros from your card, depending on which wine was chosen.

We shared a €5 card and focused on €0.50 samples -- nothing but the best for wine conosuires such as ourselves! Other group members joined in with cards of their own. It was a fun activity, and some of the others purchased wine to take home.

The way home was a walk of about 2 miles along the river trail. Once we left the frustratingly slow group behind and moved at our own pace, it was a delightful walk on a beautiful day.

In the evening we ventured out to see what the beginning of the WaterLights Festival would look like. It was limited. Most were constantly moving artwork projected onto the walls of buildings with powerful video projectors. 

A few others were static displays, while others faded from color to color. Most were accompanied by "space music" played from nearby loudspeakers. A few had technical problems on this first night of the festival, and weren't working at all. But it was a pleasant evening, so we didn't mind the walk.

Bolzano

Just as we had received a "Trention Card" in Trento that gave us free access to a lot of things, here in Brixen/Bressanone we likewise received a "BrixenCard." We haven't found too many things yet that the card is good for, but one big benefit was a free ticket on a regional train to Bolzano (a.k.a. Bozen -- it gets real confusing when everyplace has both an Italian and a German name, but they're the same place).

Like most European trains we've ridden, this one was clean, quiet, comfortable, and precisely on time. (Why can't AMTRAK do this?) We were surprised at how long the train ride was. Because of our detour into the countryside yesterday, we had a distorted picture of the distance between Brixen and Bolzano. And, we had assumed that the BrixenCard would want to promote things in and around Brixen.

Bolzano, is a somewhat more Italian city than the rest of South Tyrol (the region that also has two names, Südtirol in German and Alto Adige in Italian). It is a larger city with a population around 115,000 (Brixen is only about 21,000), so the streets were more crowded. But the architecture is much the same. It looks like an Austrian city.

We walked from the train station to the Bozen Museum of Archaeology. This is the home of Ötzi the Iceman. The natural mummy of a man who lived between 3350 and 3105 BCE, Ötzi was discovered in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps not far from here. We saw Ötzi, preserved as he had been when frozen in a glacier -- below zero and at 100% humidity. But we also saw, up close in various display cases, his recovered clothing, shoes, bow, arrows, backpack, knife, copper axe, etc.

The exhibits were very well done, and the level of scientific analysis that has been carried out is quite amazing. From CAT scans to DNA to chemical analysis, experts have determined his age, region of birth, illnesses, blood type, hair color, cause of death, and even the tribal origins of his parents.

Unfortunately, no photos are allowed in the museum, except for the reconstruction of how scientists imagine Ötzi looked in life, more than 5,000 years ago. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi has a lot of the details and some photos.

After a little more than an hour learning about Ötzi, we crossed the street to the Bozen Municipal Museum. Here, we sat in a large meeting room where we encountered two women, one a native German speaker, and the other a native Italian speaker. They were to discuss the "controversial topic" of the friction between German and Italian cultures in the region.

We found it a bit odd that these two women -- who weren't even born yet when Mussolini tried to "Italianize" the area by outlawing the German language and moving thousands of Italian speakers here from the south -- were still having issues. The more they talked, the less controversial the topic seemed. There is certainly less cultural diversity here than in our own neighborhood at home.

There was some free time to walk around Bolzano. It was a market day, so there were a lot of stalls set up in the streets selling fresh produce and other commodities. Interestingly, most of the vendors appeared to be neither German nor Italian. Some were black, and many were Middle Eastern or South Asian.

We snacked for lunch, and treated ourselves to a wonderful pastry from a local bakery. Then, when the group gathered at the meeting point, Luca, our tour leader, took us all to a bar to enjoy a local cocktail called a Hugo. It was quite good and would have been very refreshing on a hot summer day.

The train on the way back to Brixen was more crowded, especially with young people -- possibly university students on the way home from classes. Universities in Europe tend not to be residential or have dormitories. But it was just as scenic.

Off the train, we decided to leave the group and take the long way back to the hotel, along the river once again, so that we could pick up the pace and get some exercise. After a bit of R&R, we met the group to go to dinner. It was an excellent meal.

On the way home, we were treated to the beginnings of the "WaterLight Festival," which officially begins here tomorrow. Displays of lights, related to, or associated with water are being set up all over town. Some are accompanied by recorded music, and all of them seem very interesting.

Val di Funes

Sadly, we said goodbye to Trento this morning and headed to our next destination, only about 60 miles north, into the region of South Tyrol. If Trento/Trent is a region "in between," South Tyrol is a region displaced. Although part of Italy since 1918, it is clearly Austrian in character and culture.

Because the trip was otherwise short, we took a detour into the Dolomite mountains to the Valley of Funes (Val di Funes in Italian). There are three small hamlets in the valley, with a combined population of only about 2,600 people. But the small farms clustered on the mountainsides make it sometimes difficult to tell a hamlet from a group of rural neighbors.

The bus brought us to a nice little restaurant that seemed to be the hub of one of the hamlets. Our driver, who is from the area and fluent in both Italian and German, struck up a conversation with two old gentlemen who were sitting on the restaurant patio, enjoying their morning coffee. Both were local and had lived in the valley all their lives. Both spoke only German, and hardly a word of Italian. Neither had ever gone far enough from the valley to have seen an ocean (Venice is less than 150 miles away).

After putting in our lunch orders for later, we set out on a walk of just a little over a quarter mile to a little church up the mountainside. It took forever. This group gets slower and slower.

But we walked through an interesting farmyard where we got up close and personal with dairy cattle, chickens, ducks, and an unusually friendly peacock.

The church, like almost all we've seen here, was beautifully Baroque inside. People have spared no expense on their churches over the centuries! Everything was very ornate. But one priest serves all of the churches in the valley.

Also of interest was the church yard cemetery. The plots were all small, perhaps a meter square, but had two, three, or four burials per plot. The young local man who walked with us explained that bodies are buried in coffins for 20 years, then the bones are exhumed and reburied in smaller boxes. However, we saw markers for deaths as recent as last year, still in these tiny plots. We never really did understand.

We enjoyed an excellent lunch in the restaurant, with a very Italian(?) main course of bratwurst and sauerkraut.

On the way out of the hamlet, we stopped briefly at what is billed as "the most photographed church in South Tyrol." Dating from 1771, and featuring a very Austrian-looking onion steeple, it is indeed in a scenic spot. But we could not go in.

We continued on to Brixen -- or in Italian, Bressanone. Most of the signs are in German, or at least German first with Italian underneath. Our hotel here, oddly called "The Elephant," claims to date from 1551, but I think our room may be a little newer than that.

A short (but very slow) orientation walk around the immediate area showed a very German/Austrian looking city. The duomo looks very plain and Germanic on the outside, but it clearly is Italian Baroque inside.

After the orientation, the two of us explored a bit farther at a faster pace. It's a beautiful area, even under cloudy skies with occasional rain. But because May 1 is a holiday across much of Europe (their Labor Day), most everything in the city was closed.