It is sometimes thought that the Alps have been tamed, domesticated, engineered into innocuous scenery. Kaprun reminds us that this is simply not true. The mountains remain dangerous. We do not agree with medieval man that demons and dragons inhabit the heights, but we must agree with him that those same heights can be perilous. Every year, skiers, snowboarders, climbers, bikers, motorists, even hikers, lose their lives in the majesty of these mountains. A catastrophe of the magnitude of Kaprun is very rare, thankfully, but it should tell us that of all places on Earth, the Alps are among the worst to run out of luck.
AS WITH ALL THRILLS ALPINE, you start amid the trees in a seemingly benign valley bordered on both sides by gentle green mountains. At a village called Fusch, in the valley next to Kaprun’s, the signs appear: GROSSGLOCKNER-HOCHALPENSTRASSE (Grossglockner High Alpine Road). If Austrian sign painters get paid by the letter, then their only rivals in affluence would be the Welsh. The road I am about to take is one of the glories of the Alps, built in the 1930s to connect the Austrian states of Salzburg and Carinthia. Aside from this utilitarian purpose, it also serves as one of the most spectacular drives in this rugged region of spectacular drives. The route stretches for forty-eight kilometers, climbs more than two thousand meters, and offers a close-up view of Austria’s tallest summit, the Grossglockner.
A toll booth appears. At thirty-four euros, the toll seems as steep as the road. Everywhere there are signs, in a plethora of languages, asking bikers, in essence, not to be stupid. The climb begins in earnest after the booth, and I vow to keep track of the number of hairpin turns. This proves impossible, as I am distracted by the scenery; then I notice that each switchback is helpfully numbered, with its name and altitude. Sometimes these turns come in dizzying succession, but oftentimes the road describes a straightaway lazily hugging a cliff face. The larches become scrawny then vanish altogether, at which point, for reasons that escape me, the sturdy wooden guardrails are replaced by stones the size of everyday bricks, placed too far apart to brake anyone’s momentum unless he or she is extremely lucky. The mountains on the other side of the gorge exhibit extremely pointed peaks, like witches’ hats. This must be the so-called Hexenküche (the Witches’ Kitchen). They are covered with large expanses of snow, which are, disconcertingly, at eye level. We are no longer looking up at the summits, we are looking across at them.
My side of the valley runs out and I approach a pass. I decide to stop for lunch. I could have paused at any number of restaurants and shops—the Grossglockner road has these sorts of establishments every couple of kilometers, giving new meaning to the British notion of a high street. My choice is the Edelweissspitze, a.k.a. Bikers’ Point. The vista is astonishing; we can now see the snowy ranges to the east, thirty-seven mountains towering more than three thousand meters and nineteen glacier fields. It’s as if the whole world is a bedlam of snow and ice. The whiteness stretches on forever. I am about to cross the main central range of the Alps. I had read that the eastern Alps were lower than the western ones, but I now realize that a thousand-meter deficit does not make that much of a difference. The view here is as terrifying as the perspective atop the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix. We are at an elevation of 2,572 meters.
The wind picks up with sudden violence. I bend into it and head to the restaurant chalet at the other end of the parking lot. I pass a sea of Harleys. The latest to arrive is a large goulash of Hungarian bikers, each rider accompanied by a girlfriend on the back of the seat. They take off their helmets and whip their hair in the wind. Behind them, a procession of about two dozen vintage Trabants is crawling up the approach route. Most tow a trailer painted in psychedelic colors and possess a driver sporting a bushy beard. This countercultural embassy from Berlin honks its hokey East German horns and rounds the bend. I dearly hope that Reinhard, my hippie hitching friend, crosses paths with these like-minded souls.
Lunch is eaten to the sound of yodeling blaring out of a speaker system. It is not at all like the edgy singsong of the male choir of Meiringen, in Switzerland; rather, it seems more like a saccharine mash-up. Ernst’s observation about Austrian yodeling seems to be borne out: It is indeed more syrupy and cloying than its Swiss counterpart. As for carrying news of health, the flocks, and religious events across great distances, this mellifluous Austrian yodel features just one word—Arizona—repeated over and over again, so its social purpose seems murky. Does the yodeler like iced tea in a can? Navajos?
The Grossglockner road is the marquee attraction of Hohe Tauern National Park, one of Europe’s largest nature reserves. On the way southward from the Edelweissspitze, it does not disappoint. Far below the eternal snows, glittering lakes can be glimpsed on the valley floor. Clusters of alpenrose cling bravely to the steep slopes plummeting downward from the roadway. At hairpin number 20, a truly deranged flock of sheep teeters on a rockface, perhaps grazing on minerals. Then, to my delight, a marmot skitters across the road ahead of me, my first sighting of the adorable Alpine creature. A small furry rodent the size of a large cat—and looking like a cross between a beaver and a child’s stuffed animal—the marmot has been successfully reintroduced into the Hohe Tauern nature reserve, in much the same way that the ibex was reintroduced into Italy’s Gran Paradiso Park. The animal, sibling to the groundhog, is a social being, usually living in a burrow with several adults and pups. During the winter it hibernates, waking every week or so and then falling back into a deep sleep during which its body temperature falls significantly to conserve energy.
Vegetarians getting by in the high altitudes on a diet of lichens, grass, flowers, and berries, marmots are also known for their curious whistle. They emit high whistling sounds, in quick succession, when they sense danger, as a warning to their fellows. Here in the Alps, this whistle is the rodent equivalent of the yodel. I slow to a creep just in case the bounding marmot was accompanied by friends, but in a few minutes I am satisfied that he was a loner.
I am confronted by a tunnel. This marks the Hochtor Pass. I enter its three hundred meters of darkness and come out to a new perspective. Whole new ranges of rock heave into view. Now I face the Schober massif, a serrated wall of peaks inhospitable in the extreme. The road immediately begins descending steeply, so much so that a trio of cyclists whizzes past me at great speed. The scree of shattered rocks eventually gives way to green upland meadows dotted with livestock lounging in the summer sun. I have time to wave at the animals, as I am stuck behind a Latvian determined not to take his luxury sedan out of first gear. At last a spur road splits off to the west, leading to the main attraction of the drive. The Latvian must be uninformed—or uninterested—for he continues on the main road southward.
The Gletscherstrasse (Road of the Glaciers) ascends inexorably, past rushing waterfalls and through avalanche galleries. It gamely hugs the side of a steep valley wall. Past a bend near a place called Schöneck, the Grossglockner at last comes into view. At nearly 3,800 meters in altitude, Austria’s premier peak is magnificent, a towering triangle of geological gigantism. At its foot, the Pasterze Glacier, an eight-kilometer-long chaos of ice, catches the light and seems to eddy alongside the mountain. The road then begins a series of harrowing hairpins masking and then revealing the view of the Grossglockner. When, after several kilometers, the route straightens out, the motorist meets the unexpected: a multistory parking lot into which he has no choice but to enter. It marks a dead end. The structure faces a broad pedestrian plaza—there will be no drive-by pictures from a speeding car.
This is the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, a plaza for admiring the spectacle opposite and far below. The Grossglockner today is garlanded by a necklace of wispy clouds several hundred meters beneath its summit. It is a remarkable mountain, an enormous pyramid of whiteness. After Mont Blanc, the peak is the second in the Alps in topographic prominence. One has to climb 2,423 meters from its base to the summit, which was first done in 1799 by climbers inspired by the achievement of Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard at Mont Blanc.
In the plaza itself sits the most thought-provoking monument I have seen this summer—a ten-meter-long bronze boat installed by Austrian artist Johann Weyringer, said to evoke a legend of sailing the seas here in a very distant past. The sculpture stands as an invitation to wonder at the implications of geological time. These massive mountains were once not here, and this part of the globe was covered by an ocean. Looking out at the Grossglockner—so large, so sky-filling, so damned there—I find it difficult to grasp the immense stretches of time involved in the creation and destruction of mountains. As at the Iseran Pass and the Insubric Line, I find these lengths of time to be unfathomable, literally.
Thoughts of danger crowd out those of time as I take the scary high road down to its conclusion. Signs appear in four languages: Mine reads CONTROL THE BRAKES. As I have yet to see such signage in the Alps, this does not inspire confidence. Alas, the road builders were not kidding. The slope becomes very steep and the hairpins come fast and furious. I have to train my eyes on the road, so I am spared glimpsing the abyss, although fear turns to surprise at one turn as I see below me four people taking in the hay on what appears to be a field with a forty-five-degree slope. At last, the road becomes well behaved and I arrive at the charming village of Heiligenblut. The spiky stone steeple of its fifteenth-century pilgrimage church is a postcard icon of Austria: If you line up your viewfinder correctly, the steeple can seem to be pointing at the summit of the Grossglockner. The reason for the church’s status as a pilgrimage destination lies in its possession of a vial of Christ’s blood (Heiligenblut means Holy Blood), brought here from Constantinople by some knight errant in the tenth century. The knight did not intend to donate the vial, but getting caught in an avalanche on his way up to the Hochtor Pass took him out of the decision-making process. He is buried in the crypt.
10. THE DOLOMITES AND THE STELVIO PASS
TRENT (OR TRENTO, IN ITALIAN) sits to the south of the Alps, a lovely old center bathed by the waters of the River Adige. Its situation at the juncture of the Latin and Germanic peoples has made the city’s history an elaborate game of chess. The forested foothills to the north bristle with fortresses, like so many knights, bishops, and castles in the gambits of greed and ambition played between empires and kingdoms. Yet it was the bishops who left the most lasting mark on the city’s reputation, at least in the history of thought.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Trent hosted a meeting of Catholic grandees to grapple with doctrinal matters. It had been a bad half-century for the Church. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, and many others had been calling out for reform, or, worse yet, had been setting up their own churches. For eighteen years, the Council of Trent wrestled with the questions posed by the Protestant Reformation. The bishops at last came up with their answers, which, to spare us Catholic arcana, may be summarized as follows: “No! No! No! No! And no!” Thus Trent became the poster child for a profoundly reactionary movement known primly to history as the Counter-Reformation. The Latin adjective for the city—Tridentine—eventually came to mean the hidebound and intolerant in matters of Catholic dogma and ritual, particularly after the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s belatedly recognized the Enlightenment and dragged the Church toward modernity. But the Tridentine crowd still clings to that distant council at the foot of the Alps, the most prominent of the lot being the actor Mel Gibson. He is to Tridentine Catholicism what Tom Cruise is to Scientology.
Twenty-first-century Trent is a pleasant, progressive place, consistently ranked as one of the more agreeable Italian cities in which to live. Yet it cannot shake its ties to a reactionary past, not even in the city’s most astounding cultural treasure. The Castello del Buonconsiglio, dominating the heart of the old town, is a marvelous medieval and Renaissance castle, gigantic in size with elegant loggias and crenellated wall walks in abundance. The Buonconsiglio, once home to the bishop-princes who ruled Trent and its rich vineyards and silk factories, speaks of great power held and exercised. Its lasting masterpiece, located in the castle’s Torre Aquila (Eagle Tower), is a series of frescoes commissioned by Bishop-Prince George of Liechtenstein and completed in the year 1400 by an unknown artist. The paintings represent the months of the year (March is missing) and present a compelling picture of medieval life. The nobles are always at play—courting, hunting, jousting, having snowball fights—while the peasants are always at work. The figures of the nobles are also twice as large as those of the peasants. And, what is even more interesting, members of the two classes never interact.
Aside from their implicit social commentary, the frescoes show stunning attention to detail. The tools of the peasantry—rake, scythe, winepress—are faithfully portrayed, as are the billowing robes of the lords and ladies. This was Bishop George’s feudal dream world, the world he wanted to see in 1400, the world that no longer existed. Notably absent from the artworks are portrayals of the rising middle class of the late medieval period—the wealthy merchants and the affluent skilled tradesmen (only one is shown, a blacksmith). Thus the Torre Aquila’s beautiful series constitutes a reactionary statement. Bishop George apparently did not like the changed world in which he lived. And that world repaid the favor—in 1407, the middle and moneyed classes of Trent rose in revolt, deposed the bishop, and attempted to set up a republic.
Ignoring reality sometimes carries a cost.
THE DOLOMITES are the next range of Alpine mountains to be visited—the peaks that I have most eagerly wanted to see. Located in northeastern Italy, the range, once called the Venetian Alps, has long been famous for its eerie beauty, its huge stone outcroppings changing color depending on the time of day. Its renown also lies in the richness of the folklore it has inspired.
The gateway to the Dolomites is Bolzano, a historic city about sixty kilometers north of Trent. I should perhaps use its German name, Bozen, as some shopkeepers greet one in German first, Italian second. As this is not Switzerland, all the signage is bilingual.
An explanation is in order. This region of Italy, Alto Adige, is also called South Tyrol (Südtirol), as it was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This all changed with World War I, when Italy, the only combatant in the conflict looking for territorial gains (aside from France fighting to take back Alsace and Lorraine), attacked the Alpine possessions of Austria. At the end of the war, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up, and Italy, which had fought alongside France and Britain, was awarded much of what is now northeastern Italy. The Italian-speakers in these regions were delighted; the German-speakers, not so much.
I am joined by Ed, another old friend from our Paris journalist days together in the 1980s. As editor there of an English-language monthly, Ed leaned on me as his principal staff writer. He assigned me to what we called “the starlet beat,” interviewing and profiling up-and-coming French film actresses whose photos were invariably splashed across the magazine’s cover. Less glamorous but somehow more gratifying was his insistence that I write reviews of new restaurants and bars opening in Paris. Now a labor lawyer with a practice in Manhattan, Ed insisted on accompanying me to the Dolomites. Why, I do not know—and he will not tell me. Our last exchange of text messages as he waited for his flight to Milan at JFK concluded with his informing me: “You’ll find out when I get there.” “There,” apparently, does not mean Bolzano, as Ed fends off my curiosity with a smile and a repeated, “You’ll see, you’ll see.”
We stroll the old streets during the evening shopping rush. We hear a lot of German spoken and see an Italian merchant wearing lederhosen.
“This place is a trip,” Ed declares.
Eventually, we take a Dickensian passageway from the main street and end up at a wine bar with a sole customer. He is Sergio, an elderly fellow named after a Spaniard his father knew. The Spanish Sergio flew in the Luftwaffe in World War II and was killed in action. After a few getting-to-know-you exchanges, Ed asks our Sergio if he feels more Austrian than Italian. His answer is categorical: “Austrian! We are all Austrians here!”
He goes on to say that his father fought in the Habsburg army in World War I and was proud of his record of killing Italians. When I mention that I will soon be visiting Caporetto, scene of the worst Italian defeat of that war, Sergio raises his fist in something approaching ecstasy. “My uncle was there. We crushed them.”
Clearly, Sergio is no ordinary Italian. When Ed asks what he would like to happen, he outlines three options: (1) more autonomy within Italy; (2) the creation of a new country, the Republic of Tyrol; (3) his favorite, absorption into the Republic of Austria. Ed, ever the litigator, gingerly suggests that this might be unrealistic. Surely, too much time has passed. Is this just a dream of his generation?
“No, my sons feel exactly the same way,” he says hotly. “We will never give up.”
In honor of Sergio, later in the evening we order Wiener schnitzel. As this is Austria run by the Italians, it turns out to be the best I have tasted this summer.
The following morning brings further dreaming. We hike through the vineyards out of town to Runkelstein Castle (Castel Roncolo in Italian, Schloss Runkelstein in German), an impressive medieval fortress on a spur of rock dominating the valley. Like Trent’s Buonconsiglio, Runkelstein is famous for its frescoes. And for their abundance—the castle houses the largest collection of secular frescoes in Europe. They represent a dream world not so much different from that of Bishop George’s.
The frescoes were commissioned by Niklaus and Franz Vintler, two rich merchant brothers of Bolzano who purchased the castle in 1385. That sale was highly unusual—commoners at the time had no right to live in such splendid and fortified residences. But the Vintlers had friends in high places, so they moved into Runkelstein with their families. At once the social climbing began in earnest. A familial, and purely fictional, coat of arms was ginned up and painted on the wall. Then came the frescoes, depicting aristocratic pursuits—hunting, jousting, etc.—and starring none other than the Vintler brothers. They, and presumably family members, people many of these evocations of the life of the nobility—even though, in reality, they were excluded from such occupations. The cycle concludes in a final room dedicated to such classic medieval tales as “Tristan and Isolde” and “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.” The Vintlers doubtless wanted to show that they were familiar with the literary canon of the nobility. Like Sergio in Bozen and Bishop George in Trent, they were dreamers.
The Alps Page 22