Bressanone was our next stopping point. Both German and Italian are spoken here, so Brixen is the town's name in German. We heard both languages and saw signs for both names and languages. But everyone we talked to also spoke English quite well.

The town sits at the confluence of two rivers, the River Isarco and the River Rienza. Bressanone is a beautiful mountain town and of course, we are still in the Italian Alps. The town is very near the Austrian border.

We liked Bressanone a lot. It was smallish, with about 23,000 inhabitants and easy to navigate the whole town and still find our way back to our hotel. It had everything we wanted. We liked the small streets with covers over the shops so we could even window-shop when it was raining. The mountains were all around and visible from many places in town.

Bressanone also had the unique peculiarities that we liked so much in the Italian Alps, like the statue above the walkway, see below. Our guide told us the story about this statue but I can't remember it.

The next building is in Cathedral Square, the main square in town. We saw lots of interesting architecture in Bressanone.

Water and the Alps were never out of view by much. Below is very near the middle of town, from a bridge over the river.

It seemed like a cathedral or church was the center of every town and the most important site to see. This is the Bressanone Cathedral, on one side of Cathedral Square. The cathedral was built in the 10th century but was given a Baroque makeover in 1745. It has two huge clock towers that are painted bright yellow with the facade walls of pastel blue. And I found it peculiar, but the Parish Church is right next door.

There were many buildings attached to the cathedral and all of them had ceilings over all passageways and all were covered with frescoes. Our guide said that the frescoes were painted for people who could not read to be able to follow the bible.