desoto_hia873 | Bolzano: Where the Iceman Lives (Reply)

I can't actually remember the first time I read about Ötzi the Iceman. It can't have been before 1991, because that's when he was found in a melting glacier by two German hikers. I just know that seeing the Iceman has been on my Top Ten List of Things to Do Before I Die for a really long time. I've been to the Netherlands three times, France twice, and England once, but all those places are still rather a long way from South Tyrol, the province in northern Italy where the Iceman lives.

This trip, though, not only put me in the right country, but Venice isn't all that far away from Bolzano. At least, not by Canadian standards. On the bus ride from Milan to Venice, I approached Patricia, our ACFEA guide, and told her that I wanted to take the train to Bolzano on Sunday to see Ötzi. She looked surprised. "You want to go all that way just to see the Iceman?"

All that way? Venice is a three-hour train ride from Bolzano. I've been known to drive that long to see a football game. Besides, I'm Canadian. I'd just flown a quarter of the way around the globe to get to Italy. I was in the right time zone, ferhevvinssakes! I was practically there already!

It's possible that I can get a little over-zealous at times.

At any rate, when it was clear that I wasn't going to be dissuaded, Patricia said that she'd check the train schedules that evening, and the next morning, she brought me the information I needed. Our hotel was a short distance away from the Venice-Mestre train station, and I'd have to take two trains to get to Bolzano with a change in Verona.

I bought my train tickets in Venice and got a confusing and, as it turned out, incomplete explanation from the girl behind the counter on how the Italian train system works. I only had a few minutes in Verona to figure out which platform my second train would leave from, so I asked if I could take the train after the one for which I had a ticket if I managed to miss the one I was supposed to take. "No problem," she replied, "It's a regional train, so any one will do."

So, off I went the next morning. I thought I'd deciphered the posted train schedule, and I the train I got on did indeed take me to Verona. However, it was the wrong train. What no one had told me was that there are several different kinds of trains in Italy: the milk-run regional trains, the medium-speed express trains, and the super-fast intercity trains. If you have a ticket for a fast train and wind up on a regional train, that's no problem because they're less expensive anyway, but you can't go the other way around. On top of that, trains in Italy have reserved seats, and having a ticket doesn't always mean that you have a seat. Conductors don't always check your tickets, but if you're found to be on a train without a ticket (or with the wrong ticket) when they do, you get fined.

Somehow, I wound up on a regional train to Verona instead of the faster one I was supposed to be on, so I got there an hour late. But the girl at the ticket booth had said that any train to Bolzano would do, and they run hourly, so I got on the next one. I was a little surprised to see that this train, unlike the previous one, had compartments (trains in Ontario don't)--I felt a little like I was on my way to Hogwarts. I sat with a very nice young woman who was born in Bolzano and was on her way home from a semester at university in London. As it turned out, this particular train to Bolzano wasn't a regional one, and naturally, this was the leg of the trip where the conductor came around and checked our tickets. My friend from Bolzano explained in Italian to the conductor that I was clueless and hadn't meant to get on the wrong train, but he insisted that I should have known better because they'd announced what type of train this was at the train station. "But they announced it in Italian, and she doesn't speak Italian!" she argued. The conductor was unmoved, and I paid my fine.

The trip from Venice-Mestre to Verona wasn't particularly scenic, but as soon as you turn north from Verona, you're in Dolomite country. It's a little bit magical, actually--somehow these beautiful mountains hide from you on your approach to Verona and then suddenly appear out of nowhere. My sister and her husband were in Germany for a week before meeting up with me and my parents in Tuscany, and they said the same thing. The train track from Verona to Bolzano runs up the middle of a valley, so for an hour I feasted my eyes on vineyards and apple orchards with the Dolomites as a backdrop. It was absolutely lovely and almost worth taking the trip just for the view.

Finally, about an hour late, I arrived in Bolzano. South Tyrol is Italy's northernmost province and has a long history of being traded back and forth with Austria. Consequently, it has a different flavour than other parts of Italy, and a large proportion of the population speaks German instead of Italian. Most of the signs in Bolzano are bilingual.

Bolzano's not very big, and my trek from the train station to the museum took me through Piazza Walther in the centre of town. On the day that I was there, Bolzano was celebrating Speck Fest (speck is a kind of ham, of all things), and the piazza was filled with temporary tents and awnings. Speck Fest was over by the time my sister and her husband drove through, so they got better photos than I did.

This is the statue of Walther von der Vogelweide, a 12th-century poet who stood up to the Roman emperor, in the centre of the piazza. The pink building in the background is the hotel that Meredith and Eric stayed in.

No Italian town is an Italian town unless it has a gigantic cathedral, and Bolzano is no exception. The style of this one is rather more Gothic than you normally see in Italy and boasts an elaborate tiled roof.

Bolzano is a very pretty town, with Germanic buildings that reflect its dual heritage. I've no idea what this building actually is--I just thought it looked nice. I'd like to go back to Bolzano and spend a couple of days just poking around and enjoying its attractive buildings and spectacular mountain views. Even without the draw of the Iceman, it's worth the trip.

I didn't have a lot of time to wander around town, but the Iceman museum is next to a park and a bridge that look towards the Dolomites. I saw loftier peaks on the train ride and tried to take pictures of them through the window, but they turned out about as well as you'd expect pictures taken through the window of a moving train would.

The object of my quest was close at hand now, and I was in such a hurry to get inside the museum that I forgot to take a picture of it. I emailed Meredith and Eric after returning to Venice-Mestre and asked them to take some photos for me when they got there, which they did.

Cameras have to be checked at the front desk of the museum, so I stole a picture of Ötzi from the web.

Ötzi is the oldest mummy ever found. He died in the Alps about 5300 years ago after being shot in the back with an arrow and was subsequently frozen into a glacier. He and his belongings are marvelously well preserved--scientists have determined that his eyes were blue, know what he ate for his last meal, and have reconstructed his fur coat, leather leggings, and grass-lined shoes. The smoke particles in his lungs show that he spent much of his time near fires, the metal in his hair shows that he was involved in melting and shaping copper tools, and the pollen in his digestive tract shows that he ate his last meal in the spring. Ötzi was about 40 years old when he died, had arthritis but no cavities, and had several tattoos that may have been a form of early acupuncture on his back and legs.

Ötzi is kept in a small room at temperatures just below freezing. He's regularly misted with a fine spray of water, and his thin shell of ice makes him rather shiny. The cold temperature and veneer of ice mimic the conditions in which he was preserved in the glacier and prevent deterioration of the body.

The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology was built specifically to display the Iceman and his belongings, and it's very well done. Everything that Ötzi carried with him is there: his clothes, his unfinished bow, his quiver and arrows, his birchbark containers and the three maple leaves they contained that were probably wrapped around embers from a fire so that he could easily start another one. The displays and the audio guide are both informative and respectful. I was impressed.

I was also quite moved. I'd read so much about the Iceman and had wanted to see him for so long, and there he was. A real person who'd lived and breathed and died, and then had been transported through time to us today. I actually teared up a little.

Oddly enough, I discovered on the plane trip while reading a People magazine that Brad Pitt has a tattoo of the Iceman on his forearm:

How peculiar!

After spending a couple of hours at the museum and buying souvenirs in the gift shop (I have an Ötzi mousepad :-), it was time to tackle the Italian train system again. Not wanting to repeat my experience of being fined, I made very sure to confirm that I was on the right platform and taking the right train to Verona. I studied my tickets a little more closely on the trip back to Verona and discovered that I did indeed have specific reserved seats. The final leg back to Venice-Mestre was quite crowded with people going home from work, so instead of just sitting anywhere (which is what you do on trains in Ontario), I tried to find the right train car and the right seat. I boarded Treno 155, Carrozza 7, and looked for Posti 11 Finestrino (that's train 155, car 7, row 11, window seat). This was no easy task, because the row numbering system made no sense whatsoever. I'm not kidding--the row numbers went like this (I wrote them down): 35, 37, 26, 25, 27, 14, 16, 15... I mean, who does that??? I was thoroughly tired and rattled by this point, and Carrozza 7 was jamb-packed, so I wound up throwing myself into the one empty seat that was left at the far end of the car. After the train pulled away from the station, I went into a panic attack that I was on the wrong train altogether and was going to be outed by the conductor in front of about 100 Italians who understood the system.

After sweating in silence for half an hour and comparing station names to the ones in my guide book, I determined that I was at least going in the right direction. A little while later, I glanced up at the row number above my seat and discovered, to my shock and relief, that I was actually sitting in Posti 11 Finestrino after all. (It was right next to Posti 15 Finestrino--who'd've thought?) I was so surprised that I'd done something right--completely by accident--that it was all I could do not to laugh out loud. By the time I got back to Venice-Mestre and figured out how to hail a cab to the hotel, I was such a jangle of nerves that I was ready to spend the next day hiding under the bed.

In spite of the confusion, the fine, and the panic attack, however, it was all worth it. I discovered a lovely little town in a very non-touristy corner of Italy, and I have seen my Ötzi.

"My eyes have seen."