Touriseum – Museo provinciale del Turismo

The Touriseum, South Tyrol's museum of tourism, opened in 2003 inside Trauttmansdorff Castle, where Empress Elisabeth of Austria wintered in 1871. Its interactive exhibition traces the region's shift from aristocratic cures to mass tourism.

Why it matters

The Touriseum is the first museum in the Alpine region devoted entirely to tourism history. South Tyrol turned mountain landscapes, cures and hospitality into a major part of its economic base. The Touriseum, the provincial museum of tourism, occupies a castle that was itself a stage in that story, a residence chosen by Empress Elisabeth of Austria for a winter cure and later reshaped by the owners who profited from the spa boom. Its permanent exhibition traces how doctors prescribed mountain air, how railways and postcards repackaged the peaks, and how locals became hosts.

What to notice

• The castle's layered fabric, from the medieval walls of the old Neuburg fortress on the southwest side to the neo-Gothic additions of the 1840s and the neo-rococo hall raised over the east wing in the 1890s.
• The historic exhibition rooms, each with its own character: the chapel, the Deuster Hall, the Count's Room, the Fresco Room and the Emperor's Chamber.
• The second floor presents Empress Elisabeth's Merano seasons in a dedicated display.
• The interactive stations of the permanent show, which follow tourism from the first sightseers to the package era from the perspectives of guests and hosts alike.
• The South Tyrol Game, the museum's ironic finale: a giant pinball-style machine that plays with the region's clichés, promoted by the museum as the largest tourism pinball machine of its kind.

Context and history

The castle began around 1300 as a small fortress called Neuburg; around 1500 the Habsburg soldier Nikolaus von Trauttmansdorff bought and converted it, giving it his name. In 1846 Count Josef von Trauttmansdorff of Styria rescued the half-ruined building and rebuilt it in neo-Gothic taste, and in 1892 Baron Friedrich von Deuster bought it, laid out orchards and gardens, and added the neo-rococo hall. Its tourism history is older than its museum: in the winter of 1871 Empress Elisabeth spent seven months here on a cure with her daughters Gisela and Marie Valerie, a retinue of a hundred and two staff billeted nearby, and her presence fixed Merano's reputation as a winter health resort for the European elite. She returned in September 1889, after her son Rudolf's death at Mayerling, living reclusively as the lady in black. After the First World War the property was confiscated and passed to an Italian veterans' foundation; when that body dissolved in 1977 the estate went to the South Tyrol provincial administration, which decided in 1990 to remake the site for the public. The botanical gardens opened in summer 2001 and the museum followed in 2003, installed in the restored castle.