Page 4 of 10
Bruneck, Italy
Most nights are crystal clear, but tonight it's like he's stuck between stations, on the radio
I had initially planned on spending several days in the Dolomites, but the practical scheduling of the trip made such ambitions impossible. I did however have time to get up into the mountains of South Tyrol and specifically to Brunico, or as the locals call it, Bruneck. South Tyrol is closer to Innsbruck than any major Italian city, and the locals don't feel Italian at all. The language spoken everywhere is German with official Italian subtitles on official government facilities like the official rail station. You get the feeling as you walk through the town that there's a likelihood that locals root for Austria more than Italy in the Winter Olympics, if you know what I mean.
Of course none of this explains why I needed to go to Bruneck. Sure that stream is pretty but it seems like a lot of effort just to see a pretty stream. There has to be another reason. There just has to be.
From Bruneck, it is a convenient two euro bus ride uphill to the base cable car station at Kronplatz 2000. Unless of course the bus arrives totally full and you don't want to sit around in the (light) rain and wait another hour for the next totally full bus. Then what you do is burn up some of your international data plan on your phone to find out the best way to walk up to the base station and you just head on out. You'll spend a little less than an hour walking uphill past forests, past a castle, past some farms and past some cows all to get to the base station and board a private Kronplatz 2000 cable car up to the summit and right into the clouds.
Of course none of this explains why I needed to go to Kronplatz. Sure the view from the cable car is pretty but it seems like a lot of effort just to see a pretty view. There has to be another reason. There just has to be.
This is the reason that I went to Bruneck and Kronplatz. This is the brand new Messner Mountain Museum Corones designed by Zaha Hadid, located high on a mountain summit in South Tyrol and (when I was there at least) deep inside the deep, wet, inescapable fog of some pretty angry clouds.
I have traveled enough to know that the weather is whatever the weather is going to be, so I always travel with an umbrella and a waterproof hat, as well as a jacket that doesn't mind getting wet. As long as the weather is not severe, there's no reason not to head out and see what you can see. And while the supposedly fantastic Alpine views were nowhere to be seen, I was able to experience the building in a fog that made it feel like I was standing in some real life, over atmospheric rendering. Standing and getting wet, but still standing.
The museum is for hikers by hikers, specifically by a guy named Reinhold Messner who has climbed just about everything, including Everest without oxygen. Perhaps the brain damage from such an foolish and needlessly harmful endeavor made him think it was a good idea to hire Zaha Hadid, but luckily for us it all worked out in the end. The building is small but pretty spectacular- it is built into the mountain and inside it drops down into two concrete tongues and (I guess) spectacular mountain views. Seeing the building was worth the pilgrimage, it has a bit of a super-villain's-lair vibe to it and seemed completely contextual despite the fact that the heavy fog erased all context from view. The collection on the other hand was kind of non existent, there are only so many climbing ropes you can look at before you realize that no one really needs to look at climbing ropes. But for me it was all about the building. It was always all about the building.
After all that high mountain fog, I bet you didn't see this coming.
As part of my "chronological and geographical logic be damned" theory for this slideshow, we abruptly shift gears and find ourselves in Pisa, a quick stopover on the trip and definitely worth a few pictures on even the shortest of slideshows. I had been to Pisa once before but way back then the leaning tower was being repaired. No one had ever planned on straightening it out, but they did want to make sure that it didn't tragically fall over and kill all of the tourists. This was my chance to go back, to get inside and to climb it, so I bought my ticket in advance and ascended the tower. Going up was no problem- you do not perceive the lean at all and it's just another tight spiral staircase in another tower for another spectacular view. Going down however you start to realize that in a tilted tower, gravity is not your friend. Depending on where you are in angle of the tilt, your ankles start to notice when the forces of gravity are in conflict with where you think the forces of gravity should be. I survived unscathed, but can imagine that not all who descend are so lucky.
I was only in Pisa for a few hours but still managed to see all (or most) of the highlights. From the top of the tower, there is a spectacular view of the Field of Miracles, with the baptistery and cathedral and all that lawn. The cathedral isn't exactly straight either, the same bad soil conditions that caused the tower to lean are evident throughout the city, and once you start looking around you start to question if anything at all is straight and why they kept building in a place where the very earth below them did everything it could to reject their very existence. Just saying.
