Day 15 – A Quiet Day At Home In Brixen

Oct 22, 2022

Today’s Adventure

Saturday was our last full day in Italy. We took advantage of the opportunity for a much-needed rest and to pack for our travel back to Virginia. After a late start we went out for our usual stroll around the Brixen’s Old Town. Our apartment was just a couple of blocks away so we often detoured through this charming area on the way back from the Bahnhof. After two weeks we knew the area quite well, especially around the Cathedral of Brixen.

Our first official stop was at the Pharmaziemuseum Brixen (https://www.pharmaziemuseum.it/en/). This museum is located in an old townhouse and over top of a pharmacy that has been operated by the same family for centuries. The museum has displays to show the evolution of the practice of pharmacy over the past 400 years. Some of the murals in the museum date to 1620 and the paneling is from the Renaissance era. Obviously this stop was especially for Cindy!

We then had lunch at the Restaurant Traubenwirt (https://www.hotelbrixen.it/en/restaurant-traubenwirt/the-traubenwirt/21-0.html) where we shared a great pizza. It was a classic cheese pizza that was fired and then topped with smoked salmon, arugula, and fresh burrata. Naturally we added some of our newfound favorite condiment, red chili infused olive oil. We’re glad that we tried something different because the flavors were excellent.

After lunch we took a longer that unusual walk through the Old Town and explored some streets and alleyways that we had not visited before. Along the way we bought and shared a small brown bag of roasted chestnuts fresh off the fire from a street vendor. We knew that roasted chestnuts are an iconic fall harvest treat in the Dolomites, so we couldn’t leave without trying some. Cindy and I agreed that they must be an acquired taste (not unlike Aperol Spritzes) as they had a rather mealy texture and not much flavor. We chased the roasted chestnuts with one final gelato from our favorite gelateria near Cathedral Square before heading back to the apartment.

On Sunday our favorite cabbie picked us up and took us to the Brixen Bahnhof. From there we rode a EuroCity (EC) express train from Brixen north to Munich. This is a very scenic three hour ride through some beautiful parts of northern Italy, Austria, and Bavaria. We always meet very interesting people on these train rides, in this case an international tax attorney from Frankfurt that grew up vacationing in Südtirol and a couple of Aussies headed to Munich for a heavy construction equipment convention.

We got off of the EC train at the Munich Ost Bahnhof and transferred to an S-Bahn train for the short ride to the Munich Airport (MUC). We spent the night at the Munich Airport Hilton, a very nice and newly-renovated hotel that’s located adjacent to the main terminals. This location helps to ensure a relatively painless start for the following day’s long trip home to Virginia. After checking in and dropping our bags we wandered back to the the Airbräu Biergarten for one last ”Two Beers with a View” to celebrate our month-long adventure in Südtirol.

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