Matrei am Brenner – Brennerbad April 20th

My second day of walking took me up a succession of valleys to the Brenner Pass at 1,370m and across the border into Italy.

On the way out of town I passed more of those painted facades

I also passed a blacksmith’s shop. Wrought iron is very popular for shop signs, grill doors and even graves.

A speed monitor clocked me at 6 km/hr.

To avoid the busy road along the valley floor, the route took me up and down lots of little back roads up the side of the valley – about 800m of climbing.

 

The roads and tracks up the side of the valley were very pretty.

I saw a few more ‘Via Romea’ signs today but not too many . I’m glad I’ve got my trusty little Garmin GPS loaded with the route details!

Farmers like to display all the awards they’ve won at agricultural shows on the walls of their barns.

I admired this bit of road engineering, not realising that the path actually went up around this viaduct!

I missed a ‘path closed’ sign somehow and found myself in the middle of a logging operation with big logs blocking the path. I had to scramble up the side of the mountain to get around all this, whoops!

As I got higher up towards the pass, there was still some snow on the ground.

As the valley got narrower and narrower, I had to walk along the Brenner Highway.

Finally I arrived at the Brenner Pass where I found a large collection of outlet centres! This is the old border marker between Austria and Italy.

From there on it was all downhill along a paved cycle track, a bit hard on the feet but safe.

There was lots of water from melting snow here too but instead of flowing to the Black Sea via the Danube as it does in Austria, on this side of the pass the water flows to the Adriatic Sea via the Adige River.

Brennerbad as the name suggests is a spa town and this is the local mineral water.

As befits being in the German speaking region of Italy, I had an Italian inspired first course and Austrian second course.

Tomorrow I’ve got a short walk down to the medieval town of Sterzing/Vipiteno.