South Tyrol's oldest town, and the start line of the Alta Via 2.
Three trains up the Brenner line, and by early afternoon you step off in Bressanone / Brixen (559 m) — South Tyrol's oldest town, bilingual and arcaded, at the meeting of the Eisack and Rienz rivers and a prince-bishop's seat since 901 AD.
Stock up: this is the last full town for eleven days. Dinner is Tyrolean — canederli, speck, a glass of Sylvaner. In the morning a bus runs to the Plose gondola and the trek begins.
Sunday 28 June — booked, seats reserved.
Getting to the station: ≈8–10 minutes on foot from Marconi House — up Via Sernaglia to Via Cappuccina, then straight to the Venezia Mestre forecourt. Flat and easy with a pack; leave by about 07:35 to be safe.
Adlerbrückengasse 5, in the arcaded old town. The bus to the St. Andrä cable car leaves from the station.
Hotel site →Bressanone (German Brixen, Ladin Persenon) lies at the confluence of the Eisack (Isarco) and Rienz rivers and is the oldest town in the historic Tyrol. The name first appears in a deed of 901, when King Louis the Child granted the estate of "Prihsna" to the Bishop of Säben; the bishopric moved down to Brixen around 990, and the settlement grew into a walled town, with the cathedral, the bishop's residence and town walls completed by roughly 1150.
For nearly eight centuries Brixen's significance lay in its prince-bishops. In 1027 Emperor Conrad II granted them temporal sovereignty, creating an ecclesiastical principality of the Holy Roman Empire near the Brenner Pass — a bridge between the German and Italian worlds. Its most celebrated prince-bishop was Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus), the great Renaissance philosopher and reformer, who held the see from 1450 and was imprisoned in 1460 by Duke Sigismund of Austria after a bitter conflict over diocesan revenues.
Two monuments define the cathedral square: the Baroque Duomo, rebuilt in the mid-18th century over a 10th-century church, with a Romanesque cloister famous for richly painted 14th–15th-century frescoes; and the Hofburg, the prince-bishops' 13th-century palace, expanded into a grand Renaissance and Baroque residence. Just north of town, the Augustinian abbey of Neustift (Novacella), founded in 1142, is one of the most important monastic complexes in the Alps, with a celebrated library and ancient winery.
Brixen's independence ended with secularization in 1803, when it was annexed to Austria; it remained Austrian through the 19th century. After the First World War, by the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), Brixen and the rest of overwhelmingly German- and Ladin-speaking South Tyrol were transferred to Italy and the town acquired its Italian name. Today it sits within the autonomous province of Bolzano. For trekkers it is the traditional start of the Alta Via 2 — the cultural and logistical threshold where hikers ride the Plose gondola to gain the high ground.