Austria

Thirty percent of Vienna’s magnificent buildings were damaged or destroyed by American bombing towards the end of WWII but you would never know that by touring the city today. Grand edifices abound in all the great European cities and there is little overall difference between the architectural styles depending on the era of construction. European architects have emulated one another for centuries while leaning heavily on ancient Greco-Roman designs. An example is the Austrian Parliament building in Vienna with its façade copied from the Acropolis in Athens…

However, it is the detail that singles out the city as being distinctly Viennese like this little ornamented banister on the Parliament’s steps…

Or the carved pillars that decorate the front of Vienna’s iconic delicatessen, Julius Meinl

But it’s not just the architectural features that tell us where we are. There are the numerous trams that circulate through the largely pedestrianised streets and the fleets of horse drawn carriages waiting patiently outside the cathedral for mass to finish on Sunday morning...

...there are the whimsical pedestrian lights reminding us that love is around…

…and there are battalions of ticket touts masquerading as great composers and musicians as they compete to put bums in the seats of Vienna’s numerous concert halls…

Perhaps the most iconic highlights are the famous Viennese coffee houses where you can sometimes watch the pâtissiers at work….

…where you can buy a chocolate cake in a box (at a price)…

…and where you can dine in a restaurant which has changed little in three hundred years.

But all good things must come to an end . We must either leave or loosen our belts. Auf Wiedersehen Vienna – majestic; cultured and a delight to the eye and the palette - we are off to Rome.

Vienna is a regal city full of magnificent buildings befitting its past as the heart of the Hapsburg Dynasty and capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is a tower of the 14th century Romanesque cathedral, St. Stephan’s, in the city centre. It was rebuilt in the 1950s after being destroyed in WWII…

When Franz Joseph, the last emperor of Austria, slipped quietly out the back door in 1918 (after screwing up the world with WW1 because his nephew and heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Serbia), he left behind several comfy pads in Vienna. This is the Schloss Schönbrunn – probably the comfiest of all…

This 300 year old pile of 1441 rooms, (and that’s not a typo), started life as a little hunting lodge in the countryside where the Emperor could relax after the frenzy of banquets and balls in the big city and shoot wild boars.The Schloss is one of the most visited palaces in the world and it is impossible to see it without hordes of tourists blocking the view…

Photography is strictly forbidden inside the palace and this is one of the many lavishly decorated state rooms that we cannot show you…

While this is one of the small state dining rooms set for Christmas dinner as it would have been in 1800…

The extensive gardens of Schloss Schönbrunn are open to the public free of charge so it is not surprising that throngs of tourists stroll its many tree-lined avenues…


Our tour of Schönbrunn took us through just forty of the palace rooms leaving more than fourteen hundred unseen. But forty gilded rooms stuffed with opulent furniture and priceless pieces of art was enough. And in the evening we visited another gilded palace – Austria’s State Opera House – for a electric performance by the State Ballet and State Symphony Orchestra...

No photos allowed inside, but Sheila looked regal in the magnificent foyer as we waited to enter…

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is everywhere in Salzburg, which is not surprising because, in some ways he was the Justin Bieber figure of his day. It has often been said that Mozart was created just to make the rest of us look stupid, (whereas Bieber manages to make us all look brilliant), however there are similarities. Both started very young.
Mozart was composing and performing at the age of five and touring Europe at the age of six, although he didn’t really top the bill in Salzburg until he was appointed Court Musician to the Prince Archbishop when he was seventeen. His holiness lived in gilded digs atop Salzburg’s massive medieval fortress - Hohensalzburg…

This is a part of his gold studded bedroom ceiling…

…and he had a cathedral the size of St. Paul’s in the city below…

But the Arch-skinflint, Count Hieronymus Franz Josef von Colloredo-Mannsfeld, didn’t see why he should pay a tin-pot piano player more than a pittance for entertaining his guests in the court theatre and his regal concert hall in his fortress…

So, after four years living on peanuts, Mozart became a bad boy. He fell out with the Archbishop and was forced to hit the road. He ended up in Vienna beating out dance numbers for the fashionistas of the day, but he wanted to be taken seriously so he spent most of his spare time writing operas. He soon became a hit and the big bucks started rolling, but it went to his head and he blew all the cash and died penniless at 36. Now if Mozart were around today he, and his agent, would be raking in a fortune in franchise and copyright fees. There are entire stores filled with his brand-name liqueurs, chocolates and perfumes …

Half of the café’s, restaurants and bars in Salzburg have worked his name into their menus and logos...

This is the Mozart dessert at the Panorama Restaurant in the fortress…

And, on any given day, there are more Mozart concerts in Salzburg than a conductor can shake his baton at. But Salzburg has much more to offer than Mozart. In addition to the fortress that dates back a thousand years, (the largest in Europe), there are many splendid buildings more than 400 years old. This is the enormous Mirabell Palace, built in 1606, where the Mozart family performed and where much of the movie version of “The Sound of Music” was filmed…

The pedestrian friendly streets of Old Salzburg have been walked by thousands of history’s most famous and infamous figures. Kings, queens, princes and emperors have passed this way – and with good reason. Salzburg is a beautiful city that is full of life; of history; and of Mozart.

We started the week in Switzerland and passed through Austria enroute to Munich in Germany. We then stayed in Bavaria, just a five minute stroll across this typical Tyrolean landscape back into Austria…

Mid-week we took a short train ride to the Austrian city of Innsbruck and viewed its impressive 16th and 17th century architecture…

Christmas is coming and Innsbruck, like many European cities, is getting spruced up for its ChristkindlMarkt.

The streets are being decorated with grotesque effigies denoting historic figures, (the one on the right is James)...

Many of Innsbruck’s buildings have murals that date to a time when knights in armour jousted on horseback and this part of Europe was under threat from the Ottoman Empire in the east. This is an original 1566 mural in one of the narrow lanes within the old city walls…

Innsbruck has a number of ancient colonnaded shopping streets which have changed little in five centuries – although most of the goods in the stores would be largely unrecognisable by the knights and their ladies who strolled here in the middle ages…

The landscape of Europe has been shaped by wars since the days of early civilizations and many of the great fortresses and walled cities of the medieval period still stand today. This is the 16th century city hall and clock tower...

But, since the formation of the European Union, the fences and border posts have disappeared entirely and we are now back in Austria for the fourth time in a week without once showing a passport. This time we are in Salzburg for a Mozart concert in the city’s ancient fortress. But trans-European travel wasn’t always this easy and it is difficult to comprehend that a mere 70 years ago foreigners like us were being shot by the parents and grandparents of the many wonderful people who have welcomed us so warmly and treated us so well.