A tale of two Tyrols
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Süd Tirol is trending. Jannik Sinner, the world’s top-ranked tennis player, is currently its most famous native son. And following an alpine conversion while on vacation, Elon Musk has reportedly enlisted the local architects BlueArch to design a mountain chalet in Alta Badia, featuring 15 ensuite bedrooms, a cryogenic chamber and an infinity pool.
For centuries, travellers have been captivated by the Dolomites and their uniquely jagged peaks. The south of Tyrol has long been a place of physical exertion, spiritual restoration and an escape from the stifling Italian summer heat. Sigmund Freud started sniffing around the region’s capital, Bolzano, in 1911, writing to Carl Gustav Jung that he needed “a place where I can be alone, with a forest nearby”. Don’t we all? He found his “Sommerfrische” in Ritten, where his namesake promenade still snakes the forest floor today.
Summer visitors fall into two broad categories: the active trippers, mostly German speakers, who stay in the simple but numerous Gasthäuser that dot the region; and recherché newcomers from all over, seeking to supplement their athletic efforts with fine dining and an onsite spa. To that end, a wealth of ritzy new hotels have opened (the Rosa Alpina, first opened in 1939 and the jewel of the Tyrol, went into partnership with the Aman group a few years ago and will reopen after an extensive renovation in 2025).
I have been to Süd Tirol three times now, and the region has gripped my heart. I’m obsessed with the mountain pastures and, naturally, the hiking, but also the mishmash of Austro-Italian cultures within which this border region has evolved. I love the ruthlessly efficient Germanic signposts, the architectural variations, and the cuisine that blends Austrian bread and schnitzel with classic Italian dishes and some of the world’s most exclusive wines.
In the past I’ve stayed at the Adler Lodge in Ritten, a pastoral idyll where I enjoy the massive cheeseboard, the wine cellar and the ensuite sauna I can use 24 hours a day. But recently I have found myself hankering for something different. Maybe slightly more authentic and profound.
Berghoferin Fine Hotel & Hideaway is in Redagno, a tiny hamlet south of Bolzano. It sits below the peaks of Corno Bianco and Corno Nero, which make up the Fiemme mountains next to the breathtaking Bletterbach gorge. First built in the 1960s as a typical South Tyrolian lodging, the Berghoferin boasts one of the region’s first swimming pools. While it has remained under family ownership, it reopened last year following a major facelift designed to position it as a new brand of luxury hotel. The owners are so keen on discretion that they prefer not to be named. Instead, they want to focus my attention on the traditions, craft skills and local culture they’re trying to preserve.
The hotel offers just 13 suites (from €400 per night), multiple dining spaces, a fitness centre and a private spa. The buzzword here is “quiet”. The owners won’t name their patrons either but they regularly host a conductor, a prima ballerina and – most tantalisingly – the family of a former US president. The guest experience is akin to staying at a private residence or country house. I am encouraged to grab a book from the library and lounge on a sofa for an afternoon. One can eat in different locations, according to one’s mood, from the traditional wood-panelled stube that has been recreated for colder evenings, to the “smoking room” stuffed with kitsch ceramic ashtrays, porcelain creatures and smoking paraphernalia, to the glass-walled solarium from which to observe the mountains as they flame pink in the setting sun. The Russian banya (a wood-fired sauna like a hobbit’s dwelling) is cranked up at 4pm every afternoon; each day I have it entirely to myself. The service is charming and solicitous. Everything is lovely. Young children are not allowed to stay.
With its newly razzy furnishings (from Svenskt Tenn in Stockholm, as well as the more local Franz, in Bruneck), the Berghoferin is offering a different experience from the five-star package so popular elsewhere. The design is maximal and packed with detail: the hotel is colourful with thought. From its home near a Unesco world heritage site, famed for the outdoors, the owners are trying to nurture a new artistic hub. But so too have they been careful to respect, and retain, the clients they have welcomed for years. They are at pains to make sure everything is perfect: they pack exquisite picnics to take hiking, check the forecasts, clean my walking boots each night. When I stupidly forget to pack them en route to the next hotel they courier them across the valley, where they are delivered in two green silk shoebags.
Nevertheless, for all its careful modernisation, the Berghoferin is still a simulacrum of the old Tyrol. Much of the panelling and furniture has been imported or salvaged from other historic buildings. For a pure slice of old-school hospitality, I head an hour up the valley to Barbiano, near Tre Chiese, and the Hotel Briol. Built in 1928, the Briol is run by the fourth-generation descendant of Johanna Settari, a local legend who married a wealthy silk and china merchant from Bolzano on condition that, for each child she bore him, she would receive a plot of land. She provided 15 children, 11 girls among them, and slowly colonised the mountain on which she built a property for each child.
Today, the family home is the main guesthouse, and care of the “Women’s Mountain” has fallen to Settari’s great-granddaughter, the redoubtable Johanna Fink. Guests can stay in either the main house or one of the other properties on site. I am allocated the Isidor Tree House, a 50sq m pine cabin built in 2021, which sits alongside another new development, Einäugl. Both have WiFi and use of a private bathroom; elsewhere the bathrooms are shared.
Where the Berghoferin is gentle and ceremonious, service at the Briol is, shall we say, quite brisk. On arrival, I lug my suitcase down an unmarked gravel trail for 20 minutes, hoping I’ve gone the right way because the climb back up would make me cry. There is no formal greeting. Fink is a glimpsed figure who stays mostly out of sight; we are led to our room by a gruff chap in lederhosen who points to the very basic amenities and tells me to remove my shoes.
Briol is a no-frills guesthouse. It offers a half-board service and the dining rules are firm: breakfast buffet at 8am, a light lunch at midday, and homemade cakes laid out for guests and passing hikers to gorge while on the path to Rittner Horn, a punitive three-hour hike further up the hill. Dinner is announced at 7pm via the clanging of a cowbell, and guests are to be seated stat. Everyone sits at their allocated table for the duration of their stay, and all are served the same four-course meal. The food is rustic and delicious: cheesy dumplings, tomato pasta, soups and pork baked in local herbs. Second helpings are offered. Beside my plate, a napkin is tucked into a linen holder: marked with a sticker and my initials, it is recycled for each meal.
Briol’s spartan charms seduce me: I quickly fall in love. The clean pine architecture is exquisite in its simplicity. The rooms are furnished with glass jars of meadow flowers; the fresh towel supply is fabulously lean. The guests are mostly German speakers, and most have been to Briol before. There is no television, no library and, for most, no WiFi – though that seems a fair exchange for the sensational lasagne we are served on our third night. The gruff chap in lederhosen quit five-star hotel management to take up this rare posting on the mountainside. His colleague Leah is originally from Alabama: she serves dinner in a dirndl, cleans the houses, does the laundry and leads an early-morning yoga class. The certainty of Briol’s schedule instils in guests an easy calm; the sight of the hotel’s pristine bedsheets drying on lines strung up the mountain is the epitome of Tyrol chic.
I am by no means the first to discover Briol; most of the guests have been coming here for years. At least two fashion brands I know have used it as a location, and when I mention it to locals, they nod sagely and announce that “of course” Briol is the real deal. Rooms cost from €125, but be sure to book one with a view. When I return, I’ll try to snag one of the apartments in House Settari, or take the exclusive use of Welzenbacher Villa, designed by the architect Lois in one of his first commissions and today regarded as one of the most distinctive buildings in the Alps.
Briol is as rustic as Berghoferin is ritzy, but both embrace the charm of their surrounds. For those who like being cared for and coddled (and who doesn’t?) the Berghoferin makes one feel as pampered as the Empress Sisi, the fabled Austrian beauty who kept a Süd Tirol summer home. Briol is more watchful and slower to reveal its charms: it can revel in the luxury of having weathered so many decades in the region it no longer needs to care.
Perhaps Musk is channelling the same ambition as Johanna Settari in Alta Badia, with his own dream of a mountain claim? If so, I would heartily advise him to switch the planning for a cryotherapy chamber to constructing a decent washing line.
Jo Ellison stayed as a guest of Berghoferin Fine Hotel & Hideaway, from €390. Hotel Briol, from €125 per person
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