Ah, Italy! They’re finally flocking south again, your fans! After two lean years of missing Easter and Christmas and parts of the summer, at least from a business standpoint, there seems to be no stopping this spring. Bella Italia, here we come! No: we are already there.
You could experience that at Easter, when there was no getting through the arcades of Bozen, Lake Garda was firmly in German hands again and even the ferries to Sardinia and Elba were fully booked despite the high prices.
The longing is great and it must be satisfied. Incidentally, this does not only apply to German tourists. Italians are also traveling again to their longing places in their own country, and for many the Lago di Braies is at the top of the list, in English: Pragser Wildsee.
Ever since the series “Un passo dal cielo” was filmed here, in which Terence Hill plays a forester, the South Tyrolean mountain lake at 1500 meters has become the target of the masses. In the summer, the narrow street has to be closed because more than 10,000 people want to drive up there in their cars to take a picture of themselves in front of the blue-green water.
Apparently starved through abstinence during the pandemic, in which Italians were not allowed to leave their own region for several months, they flocked to the Pragser Wildsee at Easter, which is still under a layer of ice. The love for him seems to be so great that on the Easter weekend many guests ventured onto the thin ice – and broke.
At least ten people, including a woman with a seven-month-old baby, had to be rescued from the ice water by firefighters and helicopters. Was it just stupidity or did people take the series title literally, which translates to “One Step From Heaven”? In any case, it all turned out well for everyone, even for the severely hypothermic baby.
With that in mind, Enit’s Italian tourism promoters might want to reconsider their just-signed deal with Netflix, according to which the streaming provider should shoot more series in Italy to make the country even more popular. Because the love of the set tourists obviously goes as far as self-abandonment.