Messner Mountain Museum Ripa

Located in Bruneck Castle, the museum presents the diverse cultures, rituals, and daily lives of mountain communities from Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe.

Planning your visit

Ripa takes its name from the Tibetan for mountain people, and it is the ethnographic member of Messner's six museums — devoted not to climbing but to the communities who actually live at altitude, in the Himalaya, the Andes, the Karakoram, Africa and the Alps.

The displays cover how mountain peoples build, farm, worship and organise themselves under conditions of thin air, cold, isolation and marginal agriculture, with objects, textiles, religious material and reconstructed dwellings, alongside film and photography. The argument is that mountain cultures worldwide face comparable pressures and have found comparable solutions, and that tourism and modernisation are now the shared threat.

It occupies Bruneck Castle above the town in the Puster valley, restored for the purpose and opened in 2011.

Bruneck also gives access to MMM Corones on Kronplatz above it, and combining the two makes sense for anyone working through the series. Allow ninety minutes. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is shown below.