Every year at the beginning of summer it was traditional to escape to “freshness”. And in German, another word for holidays is “summer freshness”. The traditional summer freshness lasted exactly 72 days. On 29 June, on St. Peter and St. Paul, the content of the house and sufficient clothes and linens of well-off Bolzano families were packed into chests and suitcases, children were seated in “Pennen”, carrier baskets made from rods, and taken up to lofty heights, together with “Ma’am” who would ride side-saddle up the mountain.
As suddenly as they appeared every June, the “freshness seekers” disappeared again no later than on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. The shutters were closed, benches and tables taken indoors, doors locked, and by the time the first autumn leaves fell in the boulevards, the city-dwellers had long returned to the valley.