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South Tirol: still Austrian at heart
On the mountains, they wear the loden green and speak German, too
Author: By Mary H. Meier, Globe Staff
Date: SUNDAY, November 9, 1997
Page: N8
Section: Travel
VELLAU, Italy -- South Tirol's Texel glacier at nearly 10,000 feet melts
inexhaustibly down the steep Alps of the Etschtal to irrigate orchards of
golden apples.
Morning and evening, the water pipes spew the glacial melt over terraced
fruit trees like those of my host, farmer and innkeeper Franz Ferdinand.
Crops of unblemished Golden Delicious apples the size of grapefruit have
changed Ferdinand in his 60-year lifetime from an impoverished mountain lad in
the snowbound eyrie of Eggerhof to a comfortable fruit grower in Thurnstein
within easy marketing distance of the Merano railroad.
Ferdinand also grows grapes. In the evenings he uncorks large bottles of
his home-fermented red wine and sits comfortably with his guests under the
inn's thick-leaved outdoor arbor with the lights of Merano strung out along
the valley a thousand feet below.
This is the legacy of World War I and the shifting of national frontiers.
Now legally part of Italy, South Tirol has Italians in the valley cities, with
chic shops and women in stylish shoes. But the mountains retain their
Austrian character. Men still wear the Loden green, and German is spoken.
Tourists along the winding mountain roads are German-speaking, too.
But even they look foreign to Etschtal farmers, especially to the women in
their bonnets and aprons helping the men mow the steep meadows with scythes.
Along fields too steeply canted for vehicles, women and men alike carry the
fresh hay back to their barns in the traditional wicker cornucopia baskets
slung over their shoulders like rucksacks.
From these truly upland paths and dark, cool cow stalls under the
farmhouses, the Tiroleans carry on the forage harvest unchanged by hundreds
of years.
They are the cultural descendants of Andreas Hofer, who led these
montagnards in 1809 bravely and, in the end, vainly, against the French and
Bavarians who sought to quell their independence.
In the nearby Passeier Valley at Segen Bichl stands a monument to a Hofer
skirmish marked with the words: ``Anarchy is not chaos. It is order without
lords.''
These haymakers are unseen by the solid, middle-aged German tourists
mounting the lower halves of these steep inclines in the gondola lift from
Vellau, with passengers standing by twos in the wire baskets. (The tourists
have first dined on fresh trout kept alive in the huge, ice-cold Leiter Alm
restaurant water tank until minutes before the fish are charcoal-grilled.)
Food, indeed, is the grail of these bourgeois trippers.
Many of the footpaths in the Etschtal are marked at the trailhead with the
daily menu of the Gasthaus at the not-too-far summit. Dumplings and sauteed
calves brains, liver soup, and, for the lucky, the unique flat Tirolean bread
called ``Paarl'' baked in former times in the shape of hens for girls and
rabbits for boys.
On the long, mild evenings, the stroll-and-stuff-yourself routine continues
as promenaders dawdle along lower-level roads, walking a few kilometers to the
town of Tirol.
En route to the restaurant balconies to consume dishes of ice cream and
whipped toppings the size of bird baths, they pass Schlosstirol, the
14th-century castle of Duchess Margarete von Maultasch, who ruled Tirol in its
independent heyday before it was subsumed by the Hapsburgs of Austria.
A precipice to one side is crowned with the smaller Brunnenburg Castle,
where the irascible genius, the American poet Ezra Pound, made his home for
four years after his release in 1958 by the US government from St. Elizabeth's
mental hospital for the criminally insane in Washington.
Captured by the US Army in Italy at the end of World War II for his radio
broadcasts on behalf of Italian Fascists, Pound was saved from a trial for
treason by intellectuals the world over who protested his real literary
importance. (Earlier in his career, he had influenced the verse styles of
both T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats.)
Working on his Cantos during his 13-year imprisonment, he was released to
the custody of his former wife, Dorothy Shakespeare, in Merano, and his
illegitimate daughter, Mary, who had married the noted Egyptologist, Prince
Boris de Rachewiltz.
The Rachewiltz family had bought the abandoned Brunnenburg in 1927. There
amid the stone floors and high-backed furniture, Pound continued into the
1960s the long silence into which he had lapsed during his imprisonment.
As he referred to himself in the Cantos: ``In the caged panther's eyes:
Nothing. Nothing that you can do . . ..''
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