Trentino-Alto Adige: What the mountains kept
by Joseph Harris
A few years ago, in Rimini, I made a mistake. I told a man at the next table how much I liked Alto Adige. He thanked me, and then he corrected me, very politely, the way you correct a guest who has called your wife by the wrong name. He was not from Alto Adige. He was South Tyrolean. He had given me the whole chapter in one sentence, and it took me a long time to understand what he had said.
Alto Adige is the Italian name. Napoleon coined it for a department in 1810, and a Roman senator named Ettore Tolomei dug it up a century later precisely because it names the river and not the people. Südtirol is what the people call themselves, and it says the opposite: this is the southern half of a country that was cut in two. Every road sign in the province carries both names by law, and the order they are printed in was argued over for decades. When I praised the map, the man from Rimini answered for the people.
Start with where it is, because Americans get this wrong. It is not the Alps above Turin; that is Valle d'Aosta, which we visited three weeks ago. Drive north from Verona up the Adige and you reach Trento in an hour, Bolzano in two, and the Brenner Pass into Austria an hour after that. The Dolomites stand on its eastern side. Lombardy and Piedmont have Alps too, but when an Italian says the mountains without naming them, he usually means these. Trentino, the southern half, speaks Italian. Alto Adige, the northern half, speaks German. Together they make the one region in this book that was never Italian by inheritance. Rome passed through on the road to the Danube and left a town at Trento, but there was no Dante here, no Florence, no Church of Rome. There was Tyrol.
From 1363 Tyrol belonged to the Habsburgs, and it stayed theirs for five and a half centuries. Innsbruck was its capital and Bolzano was its southern market town. It was never German in any sense. The one time it was handed to a German state, when Napoleon gave it to Bavaria in 1805, the valleys rose. An innkeeper named Andreas Hofer led farmers against the French and the Bavarians, beat them three times on the hill above Innsbruck, and was caught and shot in Mantua on Napoleon's order. We passed his grave two weeks ago. He is still the hero of Tyrol on both sides of the pass, and he is the surest proof I know that an Austrian is not a German and does not care to be told otherwise.
What the Habsburgs left here is the real subject of this chapter, and it is not what I expected. Tyrol was the one land in the empire where the farmers sat in the parliament. The Landtag had a peasants' estate from the 1300s, beside the nobles, the clergy and the towns, and Tyrolean farmers were never serfs. Schooling was made compulsory in 1774, which is why a mountain province had readers a century before most of Europe. The inheritance law kept each farm whole for a single heir, so the same families have worked the same hillsides for five hundred years and still do. The Habsburgs ran their empire the way they ran that law. Let others make war, went the family motto; you, happy Austria, marry. They collected lands by wedding rather than conquest, and once they had them their instinct was to keep them, not to make them alike. The Emperor's title ran to a page, every land named separately, and he used all of it, because the point was that each piece was itself and belonged. Nobody in Vienna ever proposed making Tyrol into Austria. It was Tyrol. That was its whole value.
It was never the consensus. From the 1880s there was a loud party inside Austria that wanted what Prussia had, one people and one language, and the men who wrote the ultimatum to Serbia in 1914 came from the same temper. Old Franz Joseph had refused them for sixty years. He signed at eighty-three, tired and bereaved, and his manifesto that July opened with the words To my peoples, plural, because that was what he had always understood the empire to be. It did not survive him. In 1919, at a conference table in Paris, South Tyrol was given to Italy as the price of the war, and a people who had been Austrian for six centuries woke up in a country whose language they did not speak.
Then Italy made the mistake that the whole century was making. Tolomei renamed every village, every mountain and every family. German schools were closed and German teachers dismissed. In 1939 Hitler and Mussolini offered the South Tyroleans the Option: leave for the Reich or stay and become Italian. The place nearly tore itself in two. After the war it did not settle. In the 1960s South Tyroleans blew up power pylons by the dozen, thirty-seven of them in one night in 1961, Italy put troops in the valleys, and Austria took the case to the United Nations. Fifty years of trying to make them something else had produced only bombs.
What finally worked was the opposite of force, and it was the Habsburg answer. The 1972 statute of autonomy let South Tyrol stay what it was: German schools, German names beside the Italian ones, its own government, and most of its own taxes kept at home. Today it is the richest province in Italy and, by every survey anyone takes, the most content. The man who built the bridge was Alcide De Gasperi, born in Trentino under the Emperor, who sat in the parliament in Vienna as a young man and became Italy's prime minister after the war. In 1946 he signed the agreement with Austria that founded the autonomy, and a few years later he helped found the European Union. He had grown up inside the only arrangement in Europe that had ever held a dozen peoples under one roof, and he spent his life rebuilding it twice, once for one province and once for the continent.
That is the point of this week, and it goes back to the first page of this book. Italy itself was never one people. It is Venetians and Sicilians who share a civilization without sharing a kitchen, and the country was built to hold difference rather than erase it. Mussolini forgot that for twenty years. The republic remembered it, and when it did, it found that South Tyrol already knew how to be governed that way, because the Habsburgs had done it for six hundred years. The oldest Italian habit and the oldest Austrian habit turned out to be the same habit. It took Europe two wars to learn it. It took Italy one bad century to remember.
The people prove it. Ötzi, the oldest Tyrolean of all, walked these mountains five thousand years ago and was found in the ice of the Similaun glacier in 1991; he lies in a cold room in Bolzano. Reinhold Messner, who climbed Everest without oxygen and all fourteen of the world's highest peaks, is from the Val di Funes and still farms there. The Council of Trent sat for eighteen years in the Italian half and decided what the Catholic Church would be for the next four centuries. Giulio Ferrari came home from Champagne in 1902 and made Trento the one place in Italy that makes sparkling wine the French way. And the farms, which is the whole story: the largest apple orchard in Europe is here, in the valley floor between Trento and Merano, and the families that own it are the families that owned it when the Emperor's name was on the deed.
The table is the inheritance you can taste. Nothing on it would be recognized in Palermo: barley and rye instead of wheat, speck instead of prosciutto, dumplings instead of pasta, cabbage put up in salt against the winter, pork, apples, and butter where the rest of Italy pours oil. It is the pantry of a cold valley, and that is what makes it ours at the common table. The same climate builds the same larder wherever it falls. The barley soup of the Tyrol is Scotch broth under another name, the soup of every cold country that keeps a pig and a barley field. The celery root and apple slaw with mustard and caraway is a dish my grandmother would have called slaw and never guessed was Alpine. The spätzle is what a mountain cook makes when there is no time to roll pasta. And the braise is the braise of every farmhouse in Europe where the snow comes early. The region is Italian because it belongs to Italy. The food is Tyrolean because it belongs to the mountains, and the mountains did not move in 1919.
The wines are the one place I did not have to improvise. The Abbey of Novacella, north of Bressanone, has made wine since 1142, which is to say since before the Habsburgs, before Dante, before Italy. Its Kerner is a grape bred in 1929 for exactly these cold hillsides, and almost nobody on our coast pours it. Its Gewürztraminer is the grape's homecoming: the village of Tramin, where the vine took its name, is twenty miles south of Bolzano. For the red, the great grape of Alto Adige is Pinot Nero, grown on the slopes at Mazzon, and I have poured our own Costa Pinot in its place. A cold-valley grape from the Alps, grown in a cold valley in Mendocino. The man from Rimini would understand.
So Tuesday night we cook for him. Not Alto Adige, he would say. South Tyrol. It is Italy, and he is content with that, and if you ask him where he would rather be he will tell you he is already there.
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