ASIANOVERLAND.NET KATHMANDU TO LONDON  DAY 157/69: VENICE TO STUBAIER GLACIER, AUSTRIA

25 November, 1980

We have a look at the itinerary in the brochure, which goes to Monaco and the south of France beaches (pebbles), which aren’t that tempting in winter. A better winter option is to head over the Brenner Pass to some Austrian snowfield glaciers, then Innsbruck, Munich for the Beer Halls etc (it’s still “Octoberfest”), and finish in Amsterdam instead of Paris. All agreed, so we head to Mestre, a shopping paradise on the mainland opposite Venice and the Venice Lagoon, where we can BUY skis, jackets, boots, gloves etc for about  the same price we could hire them in Austria.

The mainland of Venice is the territory on the mainland coast of the Lagoon of Venice. It is connected to Venice by a 3,850 meter long railway and road bridge over the lagoon called Ponte della Libertà (Freedom Bridge). After World War II, Mestre had a fast and disorganized period of urban growth, and became a large urban  hub and the most populated area of the Venice mainland.

The Brenner Pass is a mountain pass through the Alps on the border between Italy and Austria. It is one of the principal passes of the Eastern Alpine range and has the lowest altitude among Alpine passes of the Tyrol area.

The mountain pass at Brenner had already been under frequent use during prehistoric eras since the Ice Age.

The Roman road that physically crossed over the Brenner Pass was not built until the 2nd century AD. Invading Germanic tribes crossed the Brenner Pass southward into modern-day Italy in 268 AD, but they were stopped at the Battle of Lake Benacus. The Romans then kept control over the Brenner mountain pass until the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

During the Middle Ages, Brenner Pass was a part of the important Via Imperii, an imperial road linking the Kingdom of Germany north of the Alps with Italian Verona.

Since the 12th century, the Brenner Pass was controlled by the Counts of Tyrol within the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa frequently used the Brenner Pass to cross the Alps during his imperial expeditions into Italy. The 12th-century Brenner Pass was a track for mule trains and carts.

Modernisation of the Brenner Pass started in 1777, when a carriage road was laid out on the orders of Empress Maria Theresa.

The Brenner Railway was completed in stages from 1853 to 1867. It was the first trans-Alpine railway without a major tunnel at high altitude, crossing the Brenner Pass at 1,371 m. Completion of the railway enabled the Austrians to move their troops more efficiently; the Austrians had hoped to secure their territories of Venetia and Lombardy (south of the Alps), but lost them to Italy following the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859 and the Austro-Prussian War in 1866.

At the end of World War I in 1918, control of the Brenner Pass was shared between Italy and Austria. The Treaty of London (1915) secretly awarded Italy the territories south of the Brenner Pass for supporting the Allies. Trentino, along with the southern part of the County of Tyrol (now South Tyrol), was transferred to Italy, and Italian troops occupied South Tyrol and arrived at the Brenner Pass in 1919.

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