The best towns you can reach by train in the province of Bolzano/Bozen

1. Fortezza

Best for a small town. 1,106 people live here.

41 min from Bolzano · homes €2,200 to €2,500 a m² in the center · 1,106 people

Why visit Fortezza

Fortezza sits at 750 meters in the Isarco/Eisack valley, on the trunk railway line between Bolzano/Bozen and the Brenner pass. The narrows here mark the point where the Pusteria valley joins the main Isarco corridor running north to Innsbruck, which is what drew Austria-Hungary to fortify the site and what still gives the village its railway junction today.

The fortress was designed by Franz von Scholl on direct orders from Emperor Francis I, whose name it carries in German as Franzensfeste. After 1918 it passed to the Italian army.

The village below is small, about 1,100 residents, predominantly German-speaking, built around a single main square, the railway station, and the parish church at its core. The cycle path running through on its way east to San Candido/Innichen keeps the fortress in view for kilometers, a reminder that the settlement below has always been the smaller, later counterpart to the works above it: the valley junction made the place strategically necessary, and the fortress built to hold it is still what the village is organized around.

The catch: January nights average 4 degrees below zero.

What to see in Fortezza

• Forte di Fortezza / Franzensfeste. A 65-hectare complex of three connected forts on opposite banks of the river, built to defend the Isarco/Pusteria junction. Now a permanent exhibition site, with a program covering the architecture and history of the Habsburg defence system and a run as Manifesta biennial venue in 2008.
• Stazione di Fortezza/Franzensfeste. A stone station building from 1867, still in active use, marking the point where the Pusteria branch leaves the main Brenner line.
• Parrocchia di Sant'Eligio (St. Eligius). A parish church from 1820 on the village square, the center of the small German-speaking community before the fortress above it existed.

How to get to Fortezza

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 41 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Fortezza

2. Innichen

Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.

1 h 41 min from Bolzano · homes €2,650 to €5,300 a m² in the center · 3,300 people

Why visit Innichen

San Candido, Innichen in German, sits at 1,175 meters in the Alta Pusteria valley near the Austrian border, about forty kilometers west of Lienz and close to the headwaters of the Drava river. The town was founded as a Benedictine monastery in 769 by Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria, charged with the Christianisation of the Slavic populations of the eastern Alps.

The monastery was turned into a college of canons in 1143, which is the founding date of the collegiate church that still stands at the center of the town today. The town is bilingual, German first and Italian second; the Italian name San Candido, after the co-patron of the collegiate church, is recorded from 1870, well before the post-1918 renaming of South Tyrol.

The old town, laid out along the Pusteria road with its squares and burgher houses, sits at the foot of the slope that rises directly into the Monte Baranci ski area, so the built center and the mountain terrain meet with almost no transition. To the south the Drei Zinnen, the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, mark one of the most photographed silhouettes in the Dolomites, with Innichen serving as the road, rail and trailhead base for reaching them through Sesto and Auronzo.

East, the valley opens toward the Drava river and Austria, followed for its whole length by the cycle path to Lienz. The town works because of this arrangement: a monastic and Romanesque core, a wall of Dolomite peaks to the south, and open riverine access to Austria to the east, three directions of identity meeting at a single, small, bilingual place.

The catch: January nights average 8 degrees below zero.

What to see in Innichen

• Stiftskirche / Collegiata di San Candido. Rebuilt from 1140 and again from 1240, when the crossing dome received its thirteenth-century frescoes of the Creation, the interior carrying the weight of the building's Romanesque reputation in stone and paint.
• Stiftsmuseum. Chapter museum next to the church, holding thirteenth-century sculpture, manuscripts and liturgical objects that trace the life of the foundation across its centuries as monastery and college.
• Historic centre. Pedestrianised core around the church, with Tyrolean burgher houses, painted facades and the Pflegplatz and Atoplatz squares laid out along the old Pusteria road.

How to get to Innichen

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 1 h 41 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Innichen

3. Toblach

Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists Tilia here.

1 h 33 min from Bolzano · homes €3,300 to €4,200 a m² in the center · 3,451 people

Why visit Toblach

Dobbiaco sits at 1,256 meters in the upper Val Pusteria, on the Austrian border, its written record going back to 827. The old settlement, Alt-Toblach, grew around the parish church, while the newer part of town took shape lower down around the railway station built alongside the hotel that opened in 1877, which turned Dobbiaco into one of the first alpine resorts in the Habsburg empire.

Further out in the woods at Alt-Schluderbach stands the cabin where a composer once retreated each summer to write, apart from the hotel guests and the trains. South of the settlement the land opens into the Tre Cime Nature Park, holding an alpine lake with a trail for walkers, and the old railbed continues in that direction as a route over Cimabanche pass toward Cortina d'Ampezzo.

Beyond all of it, reached by way of Val di Landro and Misurina, rise the three spires that anchor the eastern Dolomites. The Gustav Mahler Musikwochen festival fills the town each July and August with concerts named for the man who once needed its quiet.

Taken together, the town reads as three layers set one behind the other: a medieval nucleus, a Habsburg-era resort built on the railway, and beyond both, the mountains and woods that drew a composer to withdraw and now draw everyone else to pass through.

The catch: January nights average 7 degrees below zero.

What to see in Toblach

• Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista. Rebuilt 1764-1774 over the remains of a ninth-century Benedictine chapel, standing at the center of the historic settlement of Alt-Toblach, the nucleus the rest of the town grew around.
• Grand Hotel Toblach. Built 1877-1878 beside the new railway station. The building now holds the nature park visitor center and the Mahler Auditorium, where the composer's name is heard again each summer.
• Lago di Dobbiaco/Toblacher See. Alpine lake south of town in the Tre Cime Nature Park, with a circular educational trail and observation platforms for waterfowl.

How to get to Toblach

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 1 h 33 min away by road. The full route from Venice.

Everything we know about Toblach

4. Brunico

Best for everyday life on foot. Nine of the ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

1 h 10 min from Bolzano · homes €2,600 to €3,000 a m² in the center · 17,157 people

Why visit Brunico

Brunico, Bruneck in German, sits at 838 meters in the eastern Alto Adige, in the Val Pusteria. The name comes from the castle built above the settlement, and the town below grew up around it rather than the other way round.

First documented as Bruneke in 1256, it received weekly market rights and the privilege of high justice, and grew rich in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on the Augsburg-Venice trade that ran across the valley, the same trade that filled the Stadtgasse with merchant houses. The town has three distinct layers that sit close together but answer different purposes: the castle above holding the seat of the former prince-bishops, the walled Stadtgasse below as the commercial spine between the four gates, and Teodone at the edge of town, where the Mair am Hof Residence and its rebuilt farmhouses preserve a rural way of life that the town center does not.

The mountain above the valley, reached from the town, adds a fourth register entirely, modern and built for a single striking structure rather than for defence or trade. Together these layers show a town shaped by three different economies in three different eras: episcopal power, alpine commerce, and now winter tourism, each leaving its own mark rather than replacing what came before.

The catch: The nearest airport, Treviso, is 2 h 46 min away by road.

What to see in Brunico

• Castello di Brunico. The castle sits above the town as the former summer residence of the Brixen bishops. The museum inside occupies rooms that still read as a bishop's seat rather than a purpose-built gallery.
• Stadtgasse. Pedestrian street between the four gates, its townhouses carrying bay windows and ornate shop signs at close range, the kind of detail that only shows up on foot.
• Museo Etnografico Sudtirolese. South Tyrolean Folklore Museum in the Mair am Hof Residence at Teodone, built 1690-1700, with twenty-four rebuilt farmhouses from across the province in its open-air section.

How to get to Brunico

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 1 h 10 min away by road.

Everything we know about Brunico

5. Bressanone

Best for everyday life on foot. Eight of the ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

51 min from Bolzano · homes €2,900 to €3,400 a m² in the center · 23,108 people

Why visit Bressanone

Bressanone, Brixen in German, is the third-largest town and the oldest urban settlement in South Tyrol, founded in the sixth century at the confluence of the Eisack and Rienz rivers at 560 meters, forty kilometers north of Bolzano. The bishopric was established here in the early Middle Ages and received imperial immediacy in 1027; in 1179 Frederick Barbarossa granted the bishop the title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and Brixen remained a prince-bishopric until secularisation in 1803.

The Hofburg, the bishops' palace, served as the seat of that power from the thirteenth century, with Renaissance courtyards, Baroque state rooms and the Diocesan Museum of religious art and historic nativity scenes inside. The Romanesque cathedral was rebuilt in Baroque form between 1745 and 1754, its interior lined with thirty-three different types of marble and joined to the older cloister.

The Stufles district, across the Eisack bridge, is the oldest neighborhood in the city. The Augustinian Abbey of Novacella, founded in 1142 by Bishop Hartmann four kilometers north, runs South Tyrol's northernmost winery, producing Müller-Thurgau, Kerner and Sylvaner.

What to see in Bressanone

• Duomo di Bressanone. Cathedral on the site of a tenth-century church, rebuilt as a Romanesque basilica in 1174 and reworked between 1745 and 1754 in Baroque form with thirty-three types of marble.
• Hofburg. Bishops' palace and seat of the prince-bishops from the thirteenth century to 1803, with Renaissance courtyard, Baroque state rooms and the Diocesan Museum.
• Torre Bianca / Weißer Turm. Seventy-eight meter bell tower of the parish church of San Michele, named for its bright tiled roof, with the present shape dating to 1459 and now a museum.

How to get to Bressanone

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 51 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Bressanone

6. Meran

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

29 min from Bolzano · homes €3,200 to €4,700 a m² in the center · 41,498 people

Why visit Meran

Merano sits at 324 meters in the basin where the Passer river meets the Adige, at the entrance to the Passeier and Vinschgau valleys, with mountains rising to 3,335 meters around it. The town was the capital of the County of Tyrol from the thirteenth century until 1420, when the Habsburgs moved the residence to Innsbruck.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria began wintering here in 1870 for the climate and the mild basin air; her stays turned Merano into a late-Habsburg spa destination, drawing Kafka, Rilke and Richard Strauss. The Kurhaus, an Art Nouveau pavilion on the Passer promenade, and Castel Trauttmansdorff, where Sissi stayed and which now holds twelve hectares of botanical gardens and the Touriseum, anchor the imperial layer of the city.

Merano was annexed to Italy in 1919 under the Treaty of Saint-Germain. The bilingual city today is the center of South Tyrolean wine and apple farming, host of the Merano WineFestival each November at the Kurhaus.

What to see in Meran

• Giardini di Castel Trauttmansdorff. Twelve hectares of botanical gardens around the castle where Empress Elisabeth wintered, with eighty landscapes over a hundred-metre slope and the Touriseum tourism museum.
• Kurhaus. Art Nouveau pavilion on the Passer promenade, the spa-town centrepiece of nineteenth-century Merano and venue of the Merano WineFestival each November.
• Passeggiata Lungo Passirio. Spa promenade along the Passer river through the center of the city, lined with palms, flowers and the Wandelhalle, the covered Art Nouveau walking gallery.

How to get to Meran

It has its own railway station. Bolzano is about 29 min away by road. The full route from Verona.

Everything we know about Meran