The Treasures of Neustift

Hello and welcome to the Augustinian Abbey of Neustift. My name is Hanns-Paul Ties, I am an art historian and curator of the Neustift Abbey Museum. Neustift is one of the most culturally and artistically significant monasteries in the Alpine region. It was founded almost 900 years ago and is still a living monastery today. The Neustift canons serve as parish priests in numerous villages in South and East Tyrol and in the Abbey they run a boarding school, an educational centre, a winery and the Abbey Museum. During your visit to the museum, you can see the most important historical rooms of the monastery: the church with its magnificent late Baroque furnishings, the cloister with its Gothic frescoes, the festive library hall and the Chinese cabinet from the Rococo period. The museum itself exhibits not only valuable late Gothic panel paintings, but also medieval manuscripts with precious miniature paintings, as well as historical globes, maps and scientific instruments. From spring to autumn, you can also visit the abbey garden with its Baroque pavilion and aviary, and its redwood and ginkgo biloba trees. I cordially invite you to visit the museum and the garden and immerse yourself in the religious and cultural heritage of the Neustift canons.

Incidentally, a special curiosity awaits you already in the abbey courtyard in front of the museum entrance. It’s the so-called Wonder Well, a draw well surmounted by an octagonal Baroque pavilion. Round the roof of this pavilion, the painter Nikolaus Schiel depicted the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, and in the eighth picture field, the Neustift Abbey itself. Does the monastery deserve to be ranked among the wonders of the world? See for yourself!