Sanitas Per Aquas

Scientists from fifteen countries took part at the 16^th International Food Research Conference held at the Touriseum and at the University of Innsbruck, organised by the Touriseum together with the Innsbruck Institute for Ethnology under the aegis of the International Commission for Ethnological Food Research.

One aspect of the aesthetic discovery of the Alps in the 19^th century was certainly the self-reinvention of towns and valleys as areas of health, curing and well-being. In relation to the topic of the conference the Austrian and Italian Alps provide valuable examples of this process, reaching right into the present. Eating and drinking, bathing and breathing, sporting and relaxing have over the last two hundred years constantly been renegotiated, perhaps here even more than in other areas of Europe.

The various changes in the history of Alpine tourism lead for example the town of Meran/o, once a world-famous climatic resort to shift to hydrotherapy, becoming a spa. Innsbruck, the capital of the Austrian province of the Tyrol and closely located to other spas, is constantly strengthening its identity as centre of winter sports and medical treatment. The town hosted the Olympic Winter Games twice (1964, 1976) and holds the largest hospital in the Western part of Austria.