A bonus from staying in a hotel in the South Tyrol is that you are given a free public transport pass for the duration of your stay. If you are there for a week's skiing and are on the slopes all day it's of limited use unless you fancy spending your evenings on a bus. Or if like me you don't mind taking some time off.
I hopped on a couple of buses to visit the nearby town of Brunico/Bruneck one morning. Like every place in the region it has two names, Italian and German, as does every street in the town. Those are not the only languages spoken as you can hear from this episode of From Our Own Correspondent that Siobhan alerted me to. It's the last item and starts about 18 minutes into the programme.
Brunico is a pretty little town in a river valley amidst mountains. It's on the far side of the mountain I was skiing on and from the hill on which sits its mildly impressive schloss you can see the Kronplatz plateau and a run that would have brought me down to somewhere not very far away but it was a bit black for my taste.
The region's linguistic complexity is due in part to it having been cut out of Austo-Hungary and given to Italy after the First World War. There was subsequently a degree of forced Italianisation much resented by the local population. In the thirties Mussolini and his chums got into the act. A monument was erected in Brunico to commemorate the Italian Alpine Troops who died in the Ethiopian campaign but over the years it has been something of a focus for discontent with the Italian state and having been six metres high originally it's been blown up a number of times and replaced. Now only a bust remains on the pedestal.
There's an article which doesn't deal specifically about this monument but which has a lot of interesting analysis of the history of South Tyrol under Italian control. See Fascist Legacies: The Controversy over Mussolini’s Monuments in South Tyrol
A monument I didn't see and which there probably should be is one to Nanni Moretti, the film maker, who was born in the town.
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