You say ‘buongiorno’, I say ‘guten tag’

As my partner and I tramped through Alpine meadows and along rocky ridgelines, the melodious “Ciao” that rang out from our fellow ramblers gradually morphed into a jolly “Guten Tag”. Restaurants selling pizza and pinot grigio were replaced by wood-beamed huts serving up apple strudel and steins of frothy beer. 

We had not passed any physical borderline or checkpoint—only that amorphous mush of lines in people’s heads that makes up their sense of themselves. 

But that’s South Tyrol for you. A region with so many sides to its personality, it has two separate names: Alto Adige if you’re feeling Italian, or Südtirol if you’re more Germanic. 

It shouldn’t be all that surprising when you think that, along with neighbouring region Trentino, this mountainous slice of continental Europe has only been part of Italy for around a century. For about 550 years before that—bar a short break—both formed the southern edge of the County of Tyrol, ruled by the Habsburgs from their power base in Austria. 

The break with Austria only came after WWI, when South Tyrol and Trentino were annexed (to the horror of many German-speaking locals) to Italy. In the 1920s and 30s, the country’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini attempted to “Italianise” the region—encouraging southerners to settle there, banning the German language in schools, media, and public life, and even forcing many local people to change their surnames to sound more Italian. 

But, thanks to dogged resistance from the German-speakers, the area’s Austrian heritage was never expunged entirely. Today, the two provinces form one region, Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, where you can see street signs in both German and Italian, order kaiserschmarrn pancakes (a Habsburg-era special) alongside your spaghetti, and hear Oompah bands playing during your après-ski. It’s not unusual for locals to have one parent whose first language is Italian and the other German. 

Although there has been a great deal of pain along the way, today the two cultures co-exist mostly quite happily and the result is a delicious mishmash of Mediterranean Italian and Alpine Germanic influences that is not to be found anywhere else in the country.

But it’s not simply a binary distinction between Italian versus German-speaking areas. As I learned during my travels, in some villages, you’ll find a third tongue too: Ladin. 

Ladin is a language that evolved from the “vulgar” Latin spoken by the ordinary Roman soldiers and workers, shaped over centuries by older languages spoken by the region’s Alpine peoples. 

“In the whole of South Tyrol 4% of the population today speak Ladin,” Nicole Dorigo, a Ladin-speaker herself, told me. “They are principally based in the valleys of Val Badia and Val Gardena. The other Ladin speaking people live in the regions of Trentino (Val di Fassa) and Veneto (Livinallongo and Cortina d’Ampezzo).” 

She added that residents of Alta Badia, the pretty mountain resort where she works for the local tourist board, regularly switch from language to language without even noticing it. “When I wake up, I think in Ladin about what I have to do during the day. I leave my apartment and exchange a few words with some guests in Italian. Then I get a call from a colleague from Bolzano and we speak in German.”

Ladin is not just a language either. The local people wear their Ladin identity proudly like a sash—whether that’s donning folk costumes on feast days, telling ancient legends to their children, or in the delicate regional craftsmanship. 

So, what’s the best way to experience this charming cultural patchwork?