Trauttmansdorff Castle

A castle called Neuberg occupied the ground south of Merano by the 14th century, and among its owners were the Angerheim and the Suppan. Its fortification walls still fortify the approach from the north, the south and the west, alongside the terrain itself; to the east the ground is steep and thickly wooded.

The Trauttmansdorff bought Neuberg in 1543, moving from Styria into southern Tyrol and taking two further castles near Trento at the same time; by other accounts the property had been bought in the first years of the 1500s by Nikolaus von Trauttmansdorff. Franz, the buyer's son, had the castle enlarged. The family that took it was one of the oldest and most distinguished of the Austrian nobility.

Two generations after Franz this branch of the Trauttmansdorff died out, and the family walked away from the castle in the early 1700s. The nobility of the district was by then losing interest in the castles it owned and withdrawing into town residences, and the consequence for Neuberg was decay. That decay is dated to 1777, and between 1777 and 1778 the tower and the chapel collapsed.

In 1846 Joseph von Trauttmansdorff, a count of Styria, moved to Merano — then a newly made spa town — and bought back the castle his relatives had abandoned 150 years before, by then half-ruined. He enlarged the ruin to the dimensions it has kept since and worked neo-Gothic elements into it, the first neo-Gothic castle in Tyrol, and the castle was renamed Trauttmansdorff. He died in 1867 and was laid in the crypt that lies beneath the castle chapel. Dying a bachelor, he left his considerable fortune to the knight Moritz von Leon, very probably the count's illegitimate son.

In 1870 the castle received Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria, who had come to Merano to take a cure. She brought her daughters Gisela, then fourteen, and Marie Valerie, then two; the imperial suite ran to 102 people, quartered in houses around the castle. She stayed seven months, and within a few months of her arrival the Vienna papers were reporting the progress made by an empress whose health had not been good, which the town's mild climate was credited with. It was through Elisabeth that Merano became a celebrated spa town. She returned to Trauttmansdorff in September 1889, eight months after her son Rudolf, the crown prince, killed himself at Mayerling.

The empress's host was Moritz von Leon, who was in the end forced to sell everything he held — the castle and the residences of Pienzenau and Fragsburg, with their estates — to Friedrich von Deuster of Kitzingen, not far from Würzburg. Deuster took an active part in the life of the growing spa town: he joined the management of the racecourse, bought Fragsburg, had orchards and gardens laid out all around the castle, and raised the eastern wing with a hall in neo-rococo style. The splendour he restored to the place ended with the outbreak of the First World War.

After that war and the annexation of South Tyrol to the Kingdom of Italy in 1919-20, Deuster was expropriated under Fascism, as many German citizens in Italy were, and the castle became a seat of the Opera Nazionale Combattenti. Its name was Italianised to Castel di Nova, from the little brook that runs nearby. In the Fascist years the furnishings were almost entirely lost and the building fell derelict; the ONC looked for a buyer for the property and never found one. During the German occupation of the province that followed the armistice of 8 September, the castle was used by the Wehrmacht.

The Associazione Nazionale Combattenti was dissolved in 1977 and the property passed to the provincial administration, which in 1990 designated the castle the seat of the Touriseum, the provincial museum of tourism. The grounds were opened in 2001 as the Trauttmansdorff Castle Gardens, a botanical garden laid out in collaboration with the Giardino Esotico Pallanca. The castle is listed both as a cultural heritage monument in South Tyrol and under Italian national heritage protection, and the Touriseum itself opened to visitors in 2003 after years of restoration.