Vienna

This beautiful city was our last touring stop before going back to Budapest. We had heard what a magnificent city it was and it did not disappoint. The Danube is not a central feature in Vienna like it is in Prague and Budapest. The Innere Stadt or central city district, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is not built around the river. The area is filled with numerous museums, the Stephansdom (gothic cathedral), the Hofburg palace (the base for the Habsburgs for six centuries), and parliament.

The first day we spent touring the Schloss Schonbrunn, a magnificent palace commissioned by Leopold I and used by Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth. We toured the apartments, reception rooms, ballroom, Chinese Rooms, Million Room (because it cost a million to decorate), and the sumptuous gardens.

It was also extremely hot, and I spent much of my time wondering how the women went around in their corsets, petticoats, and long, heavy dresses. No wonder they didn’t move and had ladies in waiting dress them.

The chief highlights for me were the art museums. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is one of Europe’s finest art museums and I had never heard of it. We went straight to the floor to see paintings by Bruegel, Durer, Rubens, Titan, Raphael, and Caravaggio among others. One whole gallery room displayed Bruegels, one of my very favorites. I spent an hour in that room alone looking at Hunters in the Snow and The Tower of Babel for example.

The Leopold Museum was another surprise. It displays a collection of 19 and 20^th century Austrian art. We went because I wanted to see Gustav Klimt. Tod and Leben or Death and Life is displayed there. Klimt is the only Austrian painter I really know.

The primary Austrian artist featured at the Leopold is Egon Schiele, a provocative painter who died young from the Spanish flu in 1918 after serving in WWI. His paintings were a revelation to me. His sketches were in the basement and his paintings on the ground floor. Schiele lived in Cesky Krumlov for a while (a Czech town we loved) and painted it several times. See what you think of his paintings.

One evening we attended a concert in the Hofburg. A small orchestra and opera singers entertained us and a packed house with Mozart and Strauss. It’s hard to top Strauss’ Viennese waltzes while in Vienna. We spent three days in Vienna and felt as if we could spend more. We were bathed in art, history, and culture.