Innsbruck

   The capital of the Tyrol, Innsbruck is dominated by the various alpine ranges, which all but surround it. After Grenoble in France, it is the largest city in the Alps. The Inn River basin, within which Innsbruck sits, has been settled in some form for 3,000 years. The Roman Via Claudia, laid out in 46–47 CE, ran near the outskirts of the present municipality. The Romans had an administrative and military settlement in Wilten, which lies immediately to the southwest. The Old Town, which is today the center of Innsbruck, sits south of one of several bridges over the Inn. The original structure was erected in the second half of the 12th century by the Bavarian Counts of Andechs, who had a market settlement in the region. The area had developed into a town by the beginning of the 13th century. The counts of the Tyrol acquired Innsbruck in 1263. It passed from them to the house of Habsburg exactly a century later. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Innsbruck became the economic and political center of the province and a favorite residence of its Habsburg rulers. Maximilian I gave the city some of its most important monuments, such as the Golden Roof, a glittering loggia covered with over 2,000 gilded copper tiles added to the front built by the counts of Tyrol. Though Maximilian himself is not buried at Innsbruck, he left plans suggesting an elaborate cenotaph surrounded with 24 alabaster reliefs and 28 oversized bronze figures. This his successors installed in the Franciscan court church. In the 18th century Maria Theresa, who was also partial to Innsbruck, built the Imperial Court Palace from an earlier structure erected by Maximilian and a predecessor, Archduke Siegmund the Rich (1427–1496). Just beyond the city lies Ambras Castle, remodeled by Archduke Ferdinand II (1529–1595) both for his wife, Philippine Welser, the bourgeois daughter of a leading merchant family of Augsburg, and for his curiosity collection, one of Europe’s most remarkable. During the Napoleonic Wars, Innsbruck was under the control of the Bavarians. Reverting to Habsburg government in 1815, it increased in importance as an alpine transit point in the modern era, with the construction of locomotive connections with Munich (1856–1858), through the Brenner Pass to Bolzano (1864–1867) and to the west. With the development of the railroads came the establishment of textile and food processing industries in the region. Heavily bombed between 1943 and 1945 in World War II, it was rebuilt and much expanded in the latter half of the 20th century. Today it is among Austria’s most vigorous economic centers, with a thriving tourist industry and a diversified manufacturing base.

   See also Hofer, Andreas.