Maria Bernmeister opened the bar at the beginning of the 1950s. Born in the Puster Valley, she came to the Brenner with empty hands and pockets and her later husband, building everything up from scratch. The bar was always popular, not least thanks to its location on the road into South Tyrol and on into Italy from Germany and Austria. They especially valued their regular customers – who included the customs officials from both sides of the border. During the “Zimmerstunde” (room hour) – the waitress’s free time – they often met to play cards. To begin with, a grocer’s shop was also part of the business – a traditional corner shop where you could buy everything from flour for baking bread to toys. In this way, they covered the basic needs of the locals on the Brenner.

A long time ago, well before the advent of the euro, the Bernmeister Bar was a centre for changing money. Maria was an expert when it came to exchange rates: “Better than the bank,” it was said of her. And like a bank, she was often entrusted with large sums of money to change. Often they were only collected again after a few weeks. On a morning, it was mostly Marks and Schillings that were changed for Lira. In the afternoons, as travellers returned on their way home, it was the opposite. (What was sold there again?) And so Maria also made a tidy amount of money with the exchange – perhaps it wasn’t entirely legal, but in those days it could be done without hesitation.

Maria worked valiantly in the business until the ripe old age of 80 and was present almost every day until the end of her life. She died at the age of 101. She was considered a capable entrepreneur with an extremely good head for business. She also passed this on – to her son, Reinhard Bernmeister, who, at the age of 20, opened a shoe shop with high quality leather goods in the same building and ran the business until only recently. And he probably passed it on to his son too, Fabian, who in his younger years ran the ski school on the Rosskopf to which the Outdoor Center was added over the years and who is now breathing new life into the Bernmeister Bar.