Salzburg, June 21, 2023: Morning

I have to confess that I was a bit apprehensive about going to Salzburg, because on my first visit there I had become a wanted criminal, and I was concerned that I would be recognized and detained in one of the dungeons of its grim fortress, never to see daylight again.

Let me relate the circumstances. In June, 1964 I had joined a small party of fellow-students at the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich, Germany, who wanted to go on a trip to Italy in a Volkswagen beetle. We set out and somehow found ourselves in Salzburg, where we decided to stop for lunch. We investigated this one place – I don’t remember what it was called, but I do remember it had a terrace, as well as a large parking lot. For some reason, we decided not to have lunch there – maybe it was too crowded, and we didn’t want to wait – so we got back in the car and started to drive away. On our way out we slightly sideswiped a Mercedes, putting a dent in the bodywork. The owner of the Mercedes was having lunch with several other people on the terrace, and they all jumped up and began shouting for us to stop and wait for them to come so they could get our insurance information. Instead we got the hell out of there as fast as we could, and made it to Italy and back to Munich without being detained in Austria.

Okay, I wasn’t really worried that the local police would recognize me after 59 years or even that they had any record of the incident after so long. But it was an unpleasant experience and I did not have a good memory of the city, or especially high expectations for my second visit. But Salzburg not only exceeded expectations; my visit there proved to be one of the most memorable experiences of the Danube cruise.

To be sure, Salzburg is not on the Danube. It is in the Alps of Upper Austria, 120 kilometers and a two-hour bus ride from the river. The Monarch Queen docked at Aschach, a small town west of Linz, to let us catch the bus for Salzburg, while it went on to Passau. Those who did not go on the Salzburg excursion got to see Passau that day instead. Sandie, unfortunately, was not feeling well enough to do either and stayed on the boat.

After an hour or so on the road, the bus stopped a rest area by a lake named Mondsee, where there is also a town by the same name. The rest area had a gas station and a nice motel, the Landzeit, with a restaurant. Mondsee is in the Salzkammergut, a resort area in Upper Austria east of Salzburg. I should mention that on the previous night (June 20) the Monarch Queen had entered Upper Austria, which is so named simply because it lies upstream on the Danube from Lower Austria. Both are separate states of the Republic of Austria, and so is Salzburg (the others are Vorarlberg, Tirol, Styria, Burgenland, Vienna and Carinthia).

The Salzkammergut is not an official administrative division of Austria but rather a vaguely defined region of salt mines – the name Salzkammergut means “salt demesne” – which were formerly owned and operated by the Hapsburgs. Salt was a very important commodity in pre-modern times because its sources, in inland areas, were relatively few and often remote from the consumers, so it had to be shipped long distances, making it expensive. In Europe salt-mining and sale was frequently a royal monopoly and a lucrative source of income for the rulers. So it was in Salzburg, which owes its name (meaning “salt-castle”) to its control of the salt trade on the Salzach River.

Mondsee, the lake, is on the border between the states of Upper Austria and Salzburg. The lake is about 9 miles long, is privately owned, and the owner, Nicolette Wächter, has put it on the market for 16 million euros.

It was in Mondsee that we would start hearing what would prove to be continual references to the musical The Sound of Music. Although I had seen the 1965 movie starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, I was not a great fan of it and didn’t remember much about it. I had indeed forgotten that the movie was set in Salzburg and partly filmed there. I was soon reminded. As the bus passed the town of Mondsee on the A1 highway, our guide noted that the wedding scene between Captain Trapp and Maria in The Sound of Music was filmed in the medieval cloister church of Mondsee Abbey. (In real life they were wed in Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg.)

From then on, allusions to The Sound of Music hardly ceased. Our tour bus dropped us off at Mirabell Palace, a 17th-century Baroque affair with ornamental gardens. There we learned that the steps we had just come down from the street to the garden, and the stunning Pegasus fountain nearby, were a setting for a scene in which Maria and the children sang “Do-re-mi” dancing around the fountain and using the steps as a musical scale.

The builder of Mirabell Palace, Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau (1557-1617), was a picturesque character who deserves some mention. He was elected archbishop in 1587 and, as an adherent of the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli, ruled Salzburg as an absolutist Renaissance prince, with lavish expenditures on art and construction projects. His misfortune was that this was no longer the era of the Renaissance but of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. At first he enforced the measures of the Counter-Reformation rigorously, establishing the Capuchin Monastery as a stronghold against the Reformation and expelling the Protestants from his domain, but in the later years of his reign he relaxed his earlier posture, much to the dismay of the Vatican. In 1606, he built a palace on the north bank of the Salzach River for his mistress, Salome Alt, with whom he had fifteen children. But a few years later, he ran afoul of a much more powerful potentate, Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria, whom he challenged for control of Berchtesgaden. Maximilian prevailed, and Wolf Dietrich was deposed and imprisoned. His successor, Mark Sittich von Hohenems, booted Salome and her children out of her palace, and then renamed it Mirabella. In the next century, the palace was rebuilt in the Baroque style, and again in 1818 in Neoclassical fashion, giving it its present-day appearance.

We did not visit the interior of Mirabella Palace owing to lack of time, so we missed the acclaimed Marble Hall, which used to be the archbishop’s banquet and concert hall, and is now used for the same kinds of events by both public and private groups. Mozart performed there for his boss, Archbishop Hieronymous von Colloredo, whom he despised. It is still considered one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world.

From the palace, we proceeded south along the parterre of the Mirabell Gardens. The gardens were created somewhat later than the palace, in the late 17th century, during the administration of Prince-Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun. Von Thun hired the noted architect Johan Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, a celebrated Baroque artist, for a number of projects in Salzburg, including laying out the Mirabell Palace Gardens, and he was responsible for the dominant feature of the parterre, the Four Elements Fountain. This consists of an octagonal basin with a single fountain in the center spewing a tall column of water vertically; around the fountain there are four groups of statues, depicting figures out of Greek mythology who are supposed to represent the four elements known to the ancients – Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The relationships between the elements and the statues are somewhat obscure in the absence of explanation, which I have provided in the captions of the pictures in the gallery following.

Farther south, there are two more groups of statues of ancient Greco-Roman deities, standing on two sets of stone balustrades that enclose the south end of the Mirabell Gardens. There is an inner balustrade for the goddesses and an outer one for the gods; both are split into two segments by the exit walkway. I photographed only the goddesses on the inner balustrade since the outer balustrade is screened by trees. All of the statues may be seen on the Salzburgwiki page for Mirabell Gardens, along with a more complete description of the Gardens than I can convey here.

In addition to the gods and goddesses, there are four statues on pedestals depicting pairs of fencers facing one another as if dueling across the exit walkway. Actually, these are identical replicas of a single ancient Greek statue found in 1611 in Italy. They are known as the Borghesian fencers because the original was housed for years in the Borghese villa in Rome. It is now in the Louvre in Paris, no doubt stolen by Napoleon.

Passing between the dueling fencers, we emerged onto Makartplatz, one of the major squares of the city. It has a number of attractions, including the historic five-star Hotel Bristol; the Salzburg State Theater; the birthplace of the conductor Herbert von Karajan; and a house where the Mozart family lived from 1773 to 1787 in a spacious 8-room apartment, now a museum. However, we did not tarry in Makartplatz, but went on to cross the Marko Feingold Steg, a pedestrian bridge across the Salzach River.

The Salzach River flows from south to north, but as it enters Salzburg it takes a turn to the northwest, then resumes a more northerly course as it leaves the city. Thus the Marko Feingold Steg crosses the river in a north-south orientation. The district on the northeast side of the river, where the Mirabell Palace and Makartplatz are located, is known as Neustadt, the New City. We were about to cross to the southwest side, which contains the historic heart of Salzburg and is known as the Altstadt, or Old City. And it really is old; it was an important town in the Roman province of Noricum, and it has been the seat of a Roman Catholic archbishop since the 8th century. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, it came under the rule of a German tribe, the Baiuvarii, the ancestors of the Bavarians, who then became Christianized and were eventually integrated into the Holy Roman Empire. Salzburg remained under Bavarian rule until the 14th century, when the archbishopric became an autonomous ecclesiastical principality of the Holy Roman Empire, with a Prince-Archbishop as its ruler. It remained so until 1803, during the Napoleonic Wars, when it was secularized and placed under the direct rule of the Austrian Emperor.

Neustadt came into its own during the 19th century, when the old defensive works which had protected Salzburg were demolished and the area which they were occupied was then redeveloped as a residential district.

The Marko Feingold Steg was built in 1904 as an Art Nouveau-style iron bridge, named Makartplatz Steg. I’m guessing that the original must have been destroyed in World War II, because the latest iteration, built in 2001, is a simple concrete span with chain-link fences. Its salient feature is the enormous number of locks fastened on the chain links by lovers, similar to the Fishermen’s Bastion in Budapest. It appears at first glance that every link of the fence is festooned with at least one lock, and yet a closer look reveals that there is still plenty of room for more.

The Marko Feingold Steg also displays ten or so placards at intervals along the fences. These have an educational purpose, namely to remind people of World War II and the Holocaust. They are also associated with the person for whom the bridge is named, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who came to live in Salzburg after World War II. Marko Feingold was born in 1913 in a town which was then in Austria-Hungary but is now in Slovakia. He was arrested in Vienna in 1938, escaped, was recaptured and deported to Auschwitz, but then transferred to other camps, ending up in Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. Settling in Salzburg, he because a pillar of the local Jewish community, serving twice as its president. He also organized efforts to help other Holocaust survivors to emigrate to Palestine, in defiance of restrictions imposed by the British mandate authorities who then controlled (or thought they controlled) Palestine. He died in 2019 at the age of 106, after which the Makartsteg was renamed in his honor.

The Marko Feingold Steg is a very busy bridge, with about 20,000 people crossing it every day. The placards on the bridge inform them, among other things, that the Displaced Persons camps in which the Holocaust survivors were housed had been established by the Nazis as prisoner-of-war camps in World War II; that emigration to Palestine was illegal under the British Mandate until the establishment of Israel in 1948; and that schools were established in the camps for Jewish children, many of whom were too young to know what school was.

Our tour guide stopped at the bridge to give us a break and to inform us that we were to meet up there at 3:30 PM to board our bus to Passau, and that if we missed the bus, taxi drivers charged 500 euros for the same trip. Great views can be had from the Marko Feingold Steg and from the riverbanks nearby, and I made the most of the opportunity to capture them with my camera.

Resuming the tour, our guide led us through the narrow streets of the Old Town, past elegant (and pricey) boutiques and restaurants, to Hagenauerplatz, the location of the house in which Mozart was born in 1756 and lived until 1773, when the family moved across the river to Makartplatz.

A block away from the Hagenauerplatz is the Universitätsplatz, which as you might expect is is the site of the University of Salzburg, founded in the early 17th century. The university’s parish church, called the Kollegienkirche, or Collegiate Church, fronts on this square. Completed in 1707, it is a late Baroque church with white walls, a masterpiece of the architect Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach, who as we have seen also laid out the Mirabell Palace Gardens. The University of Salzburg itself was founded in the early 17th century. A churchyard would seem to be an unlikely place for a farmers’ market, but it is indeed the site of the Grünmarkt (Green market), a traditional farm market established in 1857 – although having long since become a tourist attraction, it is said to have lost its authenticity.  More interesting to me were some of the burgher townhouses around the square, which date from the 14th century or even earlier, but have been restored many times since then and equipped with Baroque façades.

On the east side of Universitätsplatz is Sigmund Haffner Gasse. The name caught my attention because I knew that Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 was nicknamed the Haffner in honor of one of his patrons. It turns out that the street is one of the oldest in Salzburg, dating from 1140, although presumably it did not always bear the name, because the Haffners only became established in Salzburg in the 18th century. Sigmund Haffner the Elder was a wealthy businessman and mayor from 1768 until his death in 1772. The Haffner Symphony began as a serenade written for the ennoblement of his son, Sigmund Haffner the Younger, in 1782; in 1783 Mozart reworked it into a symphony which enjoyed a successful premiere in that year.

The Sigmund Haffner Gasse is the location of several noteworthy Salzburg landmarks, including the Franziskaner Church, a Gothic edifice built in the thirteenth century; the Gasthof zum Elefanten, an inn dating back to at least 1604; the Ritzerhaus, a building which was first documented in 1294 and since 1492 has hosted Austria’s oldest bookshop; and the Museum der Moderne (Modern Art Museum) at the Rupertinum, the Old City counterpart to the clifftop Museum der Moderne on Mönchsberg Mountain, which we had seen from the Marko Feingold footbridge.

From Sigmund Haffner Gasse the short street called Churfürststrasse leads to the Alter Markt (Old Market) square, the location of what is often billed as the oldest coffeehouse in Austria, the Café Tomaselli. What actually happened is that in 1700 a French immigrant, Jean Fontaine, opened a coffee bar on the nearby Goldgasse, called the Cafegewölb (“Vaulted Café“) Fontaine. After he passed away, the place changed hands several times, until it was purchased by Anton Staiger, who happened to be the major-domo to the Archbishop of Salzburg. The well-connected Staiger moved the coffeehouse to its current location in the Alter Markt in 1764, and under his aegis it became the “happening” place, frequented by the town elite, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It remained the Café Staiger until 1852, when Carl Tomaselli bought it and renamed it after himself. The café has remained in the hands of the Tomaselli family ever since, except for a period after World War II when it was commandeered by American occupying forces, who renamed it the “Forty-Second Street Café.” It was returned to the Tomasellis in 1950.

But the Alter Markt is also home to another, almost equally famous establishment, the Café Konditorei Fürst. In 1884, Paul Fürst opened a patisserie across the square from Café Tomaselli, in a building which had existed since 1391. In 1890, he invented the Mozartkugel, a confection with a core of marzipan coated with pistachio and nougat before being dipped in chocolate. Fifteen years later he was awarded a gold medal at an international exhibition in Paris. I’ll have more to say about the Mozartkugel when I come to the Kapitelplatz.

The Alter Markt is also the location of the narrowest house in Salzburg, and perhaps in the world. It is located next to the Cafe Tomaselli and is only 1.42 meters wide. It was built in the mid-19th century to close off a narrow alley. It now houses the Henri J. Sillam jewelry shop.

In the middle of the square is the Fountain of St. Florian, which has been there since 1488, when it replaced an even older fountain. However, the statue of St. Florian von Lorch on top was only added in 1734. St. Florian, a third-century martyr, is the patron saint of chimney sweeps, soapmakers and firefighters, not to mention Poland, Linz and Upper Austria.

Just as we were leaving the Alter Markt and crossing into the Residenzplatz, I spotted a miniature square tower standing on the sidewalk in a corner. It had a tall glass window on each of the four sides and an elaborate weather vane on top, and appeared to be mostly covered with gold. This turned out to be the Salzburg Wettersäule, or Weather Column, a mini-weather station erected in 1888, with instruments reporting the temperature, pressure and humidity displayed behind the glass windows. It was amazing to me that such a beautiful, and obviously costly (even if the gold isn’t real) object could be on public display, absent any apparent security, for so long without being vandalized or stolen.

The Residenzplatz is so named because for centuries it was the site of the Archbishop’s palace, or Residenz. There is an Alte Residenz, or Old Residence, and a Neue Residenz, or New Residence; both are located on Residenzplatz. The Alte Residenz has been in existence since 1120, when the Archbishop moved out of St. Peter’s Abbey; in the 16th century it was rebuilt as a Renaissance palace under the auspices of Wolf Dietrich von Rathenau, whom we have met earlier in connection with Mirabell Palace. Down to the end of their rule in 1803, the Prince-Archbishops continued to expand and enhance the palace, adding refinements such as a Baroque façade and new wings, exploiting its magnificence to the full to project their power and grandeur. After taking over Salzburg in 1803 the Habsburgs appropriated the Residenz for their own use. Nowadays it houses a renowned art gallery, the Residenzgalerie.

The Neue Residenz was begun in 1588 under Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, who initially used it as housing for his relatives; later it served as a supplementary venue for state functions and public ceremonies. It was initially built with a 5-story tower, which Archbishop von Thun turned into a bell tower in 1702, equipping it with a carillon. Since 2005 the Neue Residenz has housed the Salzburg Museum, which is devoted to the artistic and cultural history of the city and its province.

Between the Alte and Neue Residenz, in the middle of the Residenzplatz, stands a striking fountain, the Residenzbrunnen. Thought to be the largest Baroque fountain in Central Europe, it was erected in the 1650s and is made of Untersberg limestone, as are many of the historic structures in Salzburg. Untersberg is a mountain sixteen kilometers south of Salzburg that straddles the border between Germany and Austria. It has a distinctive lopsided peak and is famous as the setting for scenes from The Sound of Music, including the one in which the von Trapps escape over the mountain to Switzerland. However, if the real Trapps had actually gone that way, they would have found themselves in Berchtesgaden, Germany, not Switzerland.

The Salzburg Dom, or Cathedral, is located on the south side of Residenzplatz. The main entrance is on the west side of the Cathedral, which has its own square, the Domplatz. To the south of the Cathedral is another expansive square, the Kapitelplatz.

There had been a cathedral in Salzburg since the 8th century CE, but the present cathedral was built in the early 17th century at the instigation of Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, who hired the Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi to design a completely new Baroque version. The new cathedral was actually built under Wolf Dietrich’s successors and consecrated in 1628.

The cathedral is built of dark grey stone with façade and ornamentation of white Untersberg marble. On the day I visited, the façade was partially obscured by a scaffolding set up to stage the play Jedermann (Everyman), by Hugo Hofmannsthal, a modern version of a medieval morality play first performed in 1911 and now a traditional part of the Salzburg Festival. Known as Salzburger Festspiele in German, this festival, held annually for five weeks starting in July, features music and drama performances, especially the operas of Mozart. Because the scaffolding blocked the frontal view of the cathedral entrance, I shot a side view instead, focused on the four sculpted figures on pedestals flanking the portals: Saint Rupert (c. 660-710 CE), first bishop of Salzburg and abbot of St. Peter’s, who laid the foundations of the first cathedral; Saint Peter, holding the keys to heaven; Saint Paul, holding a sword; and Saint Virgil (c. 700-784), an Irish-born monk who became bishop of Salzburg in the eighth century and completed the cathedral begun by Rupert.

Out in front of the cathedral, beyond the scaffolding in the middle of the Domplatz, I found the Maria Immaculata (Immaculate Mary) column, erected in 1771, which depicts the Virgin Mary enthroned on a mountain of clouds and a globe made (of course) of Untersberg marble. She is surrounded by allegoric figures representing angels, the devil, wisdom, and the Church.

By now it was getting close to 1 o’clock in the afternoon, time for lunch. The walking tour had been precisely calculated to put us at St. Peter’s Abbey, next to the cathedral, at that time. We entered the abbey courtyard under an arch decorated with a gorgeous fresco, created by whom I’ve not been able to determine, then went through a doorway and climbed the stairs to the second floor, where we were welcomed to the St. Peter Stiftskulinarium, claimed to be the oldest restaurant still in existence in the world. The claim is based upon a vague reference in a document written in 803 by Alcuin of York, an English scholar who served both Emperor Charlemagne and the Bishop of Salzburg, and may or may not be true. But whether St. Peter’s is really the oldest restaurant in the world, I didn’t care. The food and drink were excellent and the ambience of the place was superb, and I was delighted to enjoy a meal in such an historic and illustrious establishment.

Lunch lasted from 1 to 2 in the afternoon, and afterward we were free to explore Salzberg at leisure. But we didn’t have much leisure, because we were due back at the Marko Feingold Steg at 3:45 to board our tour bus back to Passau, and nobody wanted to risk missing the bus and spending 500 euros to get back to the Monarch Queen in Passau. But I made the best of my one hour and forty-five minutes of free time, and since this post is already too long, I’ll start a new one to wrap up my stay in Salzburg.