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.