Guardian photo essay captures life in South Tyrol's Teutonic monastery

The Guardian published on Tuesday a photo essay by Austrian photographer Roland Reinstadler documenting daily life inside the Lanegg monastery in South Tyrol, the Italian province where German is the majority language. The images portray the cloistered priests and nuns of the Teutonic Order going about their rituals in a medieval complex set against the Dolomites.

The photo essay, described by the newspaper as a look at "the traditions, rituals and daily lives of its priests and nuns," offers rare access to a religious community that typically restricts contact with the outside world. Lanegg is one of the few remaining monasteries of the Teutonic Order, a Catholic religious order founded during the Crusades.

For the Aosta Valley, which like South Tyrol enjoys special autonomy status under the Italian constitution, the Guardian's coverage highlights how foreign media continue to be drawn to the linguistic and cultural distinctiveness of Italy's Alpine border regions. The two provinces share a history of Germanic and Romance language contact, though Valle d'Aosta's minority language is French rather than German.

South Tyrol — officially the autonomous province of Bolzano/Bozen — is the northernmost territory of Italy, where roughly 70 percent of the population speaks German as a first language. The region's autonomy, granted after the 1946 Gruber–De Gasperi agreement and refined through subsequent statutes, has been widely cited by foreign political scientists as a model for minority-language governance.

Reinstadler's photographs, published without accompanying text beyond captions, show priests in white habits tending the monastery's garden, nuns praying in a candlelit chapel, and the surrounding alpine landscape visible through ancient windows. The Guardian noted that the photographer "gained access to the cloistered Lanegg monastery" for the project.

The Teutonic Order's presence in South Tyrol dates to the 13th century, when the order administered hospitals and churches across the German-speaking Alps. Lanegg itself, rebuilt after a fire in the 19th century, now functions primarily as a retreat and spiritual centre. The order's global headquarters is in Vienna.

For Italy's other autonomous Alpine region, the contrast is notable: Valle d'Aosta's Franco-Provençal heritage has received far less international documentary attention. While South Tyrol's German-speaking culture has been extensively covered in German-language media and occasionally in the English-language press, the Aosta Valley's bilingual identity remains less visible in foreign cultural journalism.

The Guardian's choice to feature Lanegg underscores a broader fascination with minority communities living in geographically extreme environments. The monastery sits at an altitude of roughly 900 metres, with the Dolomites rising behind it — a landscape not unlike the peaks that surround Aosta.