Page 182 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Margareth Lanzinger

place (Lanzinger 2003; 2015). The route through the Puster Valley became
increasingly important as a transit route in the course of the eighteenth
century. Trieste had been declared a Habsburg free port in 1719, and from
the 1720s, the so-called ‘main trade routes’ were extended from Vienna
through Inner Austria to Trieste.⁶ From Vienna’s point of view, these mea-
sures were aimed at shifting transit routes further east from the Brenner
route. The Trieste route was also favoured by a lower customs tariff in 1751,
which led to protests from the merchants of Bolzano.

Andreas Hofer, the Innkeeper of the Sandhof Inn in Passeier
The first case concerns a famous Tyrolean: Andreas Hofer. Andreas Ober-
hofer first systematically analysed his activities as an innkeeper and mer-
chant around 2009, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Ty-
rolean uprising of 1809. Andreas Hofer is of interest here not as a leader of
an uprising movement, but as a representative of the largely forgotten his-
tory of the importance of early modern inns and innkeepers for the trans-
port and transit of goods and their significance for the regional and supra-
regional economy. There is no mention of this important activity on the
numerous plaques on inns in Klausen or Sterzing, for example, which com-
memorate the long history of these establishments. Andreas Hofer is men-
tioned – alongside Emperor Franz Josef, Archduke Carl, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and Heinrich Heine – as a guest of the house on the plaque
attached to the Goldene Krone Inn, the Golden Crown, in Sterzing. The
plaque points out that this is one of the ‘oldest historical inns in South Ty-
rol’: first mentioned in a document in 1200 and granted the ‘imperial right
of innkeeper’ in 1540. This was when it was given the name ‘Krone.’⁷ There
is also no reference to transit traffic, without which the large number of
historic inns cannot be explained.
Andreas Hofer (1767–1810) was an innkeeper at the Sandhof Inn in St.
Leonhard in the Passeier Valley, which branches off to the northeast of

⁶ North of Brixen, the so-called ‘Lower Road,’ the Strada d’Alemagna, branched off through
the Puster Valley and led to Venice via Toblach and Ampezzo. Another route ran through
the Sexten Valley via the Kreuzberg Pass and Cadore to Trieste and Venice. A third route
went through the Puster Valley to Lienz in today’s East Tyrol and Villach, and from there via
Tarvisio and the Canal Valley to the south or to Vienna (Bonoldi 1999, 65, 82–91; Helmedach
2002).
⁷ A link to trade and transport is provided by the website which, as a result of the Inter-
reg project ‘alte brennerpass-straße/antica strada del brennero,’ presents some historic
inns located along the northern Brenner route: https://www.altebrennerpassstrasse.eu/de
/betriebe/6-traditionshotel-krone.html (28 November 2024).

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