Bressanone
The Oldest Town In The South Tyrol, Seat Of The Prince Bishops Of Brixen From The Eleventh Century, With A Frescoed Medieval Cathedral Cloister And The Hofburg Palace · Bressanone, Trentino-Alto Adige
The oldest town in the South Tyrol, and for eight hundred years the seat of prince-bishops who ran it as a small independent state, which is why a place of twenty-odd thousand people has a baroque cathedral, a moated palace and a treasury full of medieval vestments. The thing to see is the cloister beside the cathedral: every bay of it frescoed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, panel after panel of biblical scenes in a continuous cycle, and it is open, free and usually empty. The prince-bishops' Hofburg next door is a palace with a courtyard of terracotta statuary and a collection of carved wooden nativity figures running into the thousands. Around all that is a compact arcaded centre where the language is German, the food is dumplings and smoked pork, and the wine is a light red almost nobody outside the valley drinks. The Dolomites start twenty minutes east and Austria is forty minutes north.
Piazza Duomo 1, Bressanone, Trentino-Alto Adige, 39042, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the cathedral and its cloister open daily and free with a midday interval and shorter winter hours, closing for services. The Hofburg and Diocesan Museum close one day a week, keep seasonal hours and show the nativity collection in winter only. The Abbazia di Novacella runs guided tours at set times with its own closures. The Plose cable car is seasonal and stops in wind. THE NATIONAL FREE FIRST SUNDAY DOES NOT APPLY - provincial museums. Confirm before travelling.