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

Glurns

Why visit Glurns

The town sits at 907 metres in the upper valley, twenty minutes by car from both the Austrian and Swiss borders, on the Adige river at the southern entrance to the national park. City status was awarded by Emperor Henry of Bohemia in 1304, an honor that has stayed attached to the place ever since even as the population inside the walls stayed under a thousand.

After the Battle of Calven in 1499, the Habsburgs under Emperor Maximilian I rebuilt the town as a bulwark against the forces of the Three Leagues of Graubünden, and it is that rebuilding which produced the fortification standing today. The walled core and the church outside it mark the two halves of the town: the streets and Lauben arcades, paved in cobble, enclosed within the ring of walls, and the parish church standing apart on the riverbank, holding its own late Gothic frescoes away from the defended center.

A city built for defense against the Three Leagues of Graubünden still reads, in its layout, as a place organized entirely around the line where the walls stand and the ground just beyond them: the guarded interior on one side, the river and the open approach to the mountains on the other.

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What to see in Glurns

• Mura cittadine. Walls built under Emperor Maximilian I after 1499, following the Battle of Calven, as a bulwark against the forces of the Three Leagues of Graubünden. The patrol path still runs continuous along the inside face.
• Centro storico. Walled core of unbroken three-storey Lauben arcades along the two main streets, paved in stone and listed on the Borghi più belli d'Italia.
• Chiesa di San Pancrazio. Parish church just outside the walls on the bank of the Adige, with a Gothic nave and a series of late medieval wall frescoes inside.

How to get to Glurns

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 102 minutes away by road.

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Toblach

Why visit Toblach

Dobbiaco sits at 1,256 metres 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 Fanes-Sennes-Braies 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.

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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 centre 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 centre 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 Fanes-Sennes-Braies Nature Park, with a circular educational trail and observation platforms for waterfowl.

How to get to Toblach

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 93 minutes away by road.

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Innichen

Why visit Innichen

San Candido, Innichen in German, sits at 1,175 metres in the Alta Pusteria valley near the Austrian border, twenty-six kilometres west of Lienz and 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 centre of the town today. The town is bilingual, German first and Italian second; the Italian name San Candido was applied after 1918 by the Tolomei programme that renamed every place in 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 centre and the mountain terrain meet with almost no transition. To the south the Drei Zinnen, the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, mark the most photographed silhouette 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.

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What to see in Innichen

• Stiftskirche / Collegiata di San Candido. Extended around 1280 with a Creation cupola that is the largest surviving fresco of its kind, 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

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 101 minutes away by road.

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Sterzing

Why visit Sterzing

Vipiteno sits at 948 metres in the upper Wipptal, twelve kilometres south of the Brenner Pass and the Austrian border, with the Eisack river running through the medieval town and the Stubai Alps rising on three sides. The German-speaking population calls it Sterzing and outnumbers the Italian speakers by roughly three to one.

The town grew rich in the late fifteenth century from silver and lead mined in the Schneeberg deposits of the Ridnaun and Pflersch valleys to the west, and from its position on the Brenner trade route. The mines belonged to the Fuggers of Augsburg, the banking family who financed Habsburg emperors; Vipiteno is still sometimes called Fuggerstadt.

The Zwölferturm, a forty-six metre tower built in 1472, stands at the centre of Piazza Città and divides the Altstadt from the Neustadt, the two halves of the medieval town. Both halves are lined with painted facades, oriel windows and stepped gables built when the silver flowed.

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What to see in Sterzing

• Zwölferturm. Forty-six metre tower built in 1472 at the centre of Piazza Città, dividing the Altstadt from the Neustadt and serving as the town's symbol.
• Altstadt and Neustadt. Two halves of the medieval town on either side of the Zwölferturm, lined with painted facades, oriel windows and stepped gables from the silver-mining century.
• Schneeberg mining museum. Provincial mining museum in the Ridnaun valley west of Vipiteno, on the site of the Fugger-era silver and lead workings that funded the town's wealth.

How to get to Sterzing

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 68 minutes away by road.

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Brunico

Why visit Brunico

Brunico, Bruneck in German, sits at 838 metres 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 centre 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.

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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

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 69 minutes away by road.

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Bressanone

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 metres, forty kilometres 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, faced with thirty-three different types of marble and joined to the older cloister.

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

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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 metre 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

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 51 minutes away by road.

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Meran

Why visit Meran

Merano sits at 324 metres 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 metres 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 centre of South Tyrolean wine and apple farming, host of the Merano WineFestival each November at the Kurhaus.

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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 centre of the city, lined with palms, flowers and the Wandelhalle, the covered Art Nouveau walking gallery.

How to get to Meran

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Bolzano is roughly 29 minutes away by road.

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