28 May 2019
Our day in Salzberg

"Although everything was very wet it wasn’t actually raining when we woke up. Marianne got Salzburg cards at the campsite office. As we were some distance from the old city, we decided that cycling in might be a wet business so we caught the bus. The fare was included in the Salzburg card. The stop was less than 100 m from the camping place and we had a ten minute wait. The bus dropped us just across the Salzach River in the Griesgasse. As we started walking we noticed a little backerei called the BackWerk that was serving coffee so sat down for a cup and to orientate ourselves. Both Stephen and I had very little recognition from our previous visit, except the rain and many umbrellas!! Even memories from my backpacker days were very vague. The old city did look quite straightforward, though, so we first headed for the nearby Mozart Geburtshaus, or birth house, where Wolfgang Amadeus was born. This was through the Hagenhauer Plaz onto which the brightly painted building housing the family home faced. The excellent museum was very busy (Salzberg is very touristy), and had many interesting exhibits such as the violin that Mozart played as a child, other instruments, paintings and letters. And it was nice and warm inside!"

From here we continued along the street into the Judengasse. Salzberg is a wonderful classical neo-classical city, with gracious pastel buildings all "talking politely" to each other. The signs on the buildings were also extremely tasteful and ornate. One could easily say that Salzberg is a particularly good example of aesthetic good taste.

We were lucky that it was still mostly dry, but ominous grey skies loomed. Our route took us through the Residenzplatz or city square and then to the Domplatz overlooked by the Cathedral. The cathedral was a fine example of fairly reserved Italian Baroque (although the sculpture on the vaulting is very exuberant) dating from 1628. What was quite remarkable is that part of it is built on the foundations of the 8th century basilica that preceded it. That the first church on the site, 66 metres long and 33 metres wide, was built 1300 years ago (before 774 AD) is amazing! The present cathedral was bombed in 1944 with the central dome over the crossing being destroyed. Restoration was completed by 1959.

It was now starting to drizzle and we thought that the castle might be the driest place to go to. So we caught yet another funicular to get to the top. The castle is very big and there were lots of exhibits to see, all nicely inside. But we were also lucky in that the rain stopped while we were walking around the walls so we were able to enjoy the views of the city. In the museums there were the usual exhibits about the history of the castle and city, the prison cells and torture chamber, armour and weapons and another exhibit on puppetry.

We spent a relaxing hour at the castle and then it was time to go back to the city. This was our last ride in a funicular for a while. At the bottom station there was an extremely interesting exhibit on the way water power had been used in Salzburg from 1136 AD, when the monks from the local monastery built an aqueduct under the castle hill to use the water to power mills, to the present day where it is being used for hydro-electric power.

As it was now lunch time and in the tourist zone everything was very expensive, so we decided to go back to the BackWerk where we had had coffee earlier. This was a good choice as sausage roll type things that we had were excellent and we could sit down at the window and relax for a while. Watching the umbrellas go by certainly took me back to our visit many years ago when we watched umbrellas from a much more upmarket café. (It was pre-euro days and the rand was much stronger.)

The rain was still coming down steadily as we walked back to the cathedral precinct where we went to the Panorama Museum. This was another interesting visit being a small museum giving information about the city’s major city fires and with the main exhibit a circular panoramic painting of the city done in 1826 by Johan Sattler. The museum we particularly wanted to see was the Residenzgalerie which has works by Rembrandt and other great masters, but it was closed on the day. So we went to the Rupertinum, one of the parts of the Museum der Moderne. It certainly wasn’t my cup of tea and I was a little disappointed.

Then it was the Mozart Residence museum. This was across the river in the building known as the Tanzmeisterhaus (dancing-master’s house). It was as interesting as the birth house had been, but what was very apparent was that Leopold Mozart, Amadeus’s father, was a very fine musician and composer in his own right, although very much overshadowed by his son. His violin textbook is also highly regarded to this day. The references to the frequent disagreements and arguments between the two were also insightful.

The house is also a fairly recent rebuild of the original. Two thirds of the Tanzmeisterhaus were destroyed by bombing in 1944 during the Second World War. The bombed section was replaced by an office building and the Mozart museum established in the surviving third in 1989. In 1994 the office building was demolished and the Tanzmeisterhaus was restored to what it had been at the time the Mozarts stayed there.

After this it was time to go "home". We caught the bus at the same stop as we had got off at and were soon back at the camper. It was still drizzling. Marianne cooked our last meal in the camper and we sat reflecting on where we had been and what we had seen, and what we had missed seeing. Tomorrow we would be back in Munich! In the meanwhile the rain was still coming down in buckets!

Geschreven door Leartravels