Salzburg

Sat October 28, 2006
Nic and I went to Salzburg, Austria, to celebrate my birthday over 3 days :) It was wonderful to have some time to ourselves and most of the time was spent relaxing, seeing sights, talking endlessly and appreciating Autumn in all its beauty.

We stayed in the New Town, visiting Mirabell Palace (first photo link) on the way to the Old Town (second photo link) where Mozart's birthplace is the central building of the shopping area. It is surrounded by gorgeous streets filled with cute signage and designer boutiques. Unfortunately there was nothing interesting or endearing about the museum within Mozart's birthplace... it contains no actual information about Mozart and houses objects that are of little or no interest at all..

We visited Salzburg’s cathedral which is apparently the most impressive baroque cathedral in the world (see photo link to the left) and wandered around the great fortress of the Archbishop Princes of Salzburg (see photo link below). The autumn views of the entire city were gorgeous and it seems an artist from the 18th Century agreed... we visited the Panorama Museum and were astounded by the impressive large scale panoramic painting he produced that showed a 360 degree view of Salzburg as we had just viewed but centuries beforehand. The detail and scale was truly incredible. Apparently its original purpose was to advertise Salzburg to the rest of Europe and promote trade by taking this enormous painting travelling. The rest of the museum had smaller paintings from the same artist of other European cities.








After visiting the Panorama museum, we explored the Residence of the Prince Archbishops of Salzburg. One evening we spoilt ourselves with an 18th century style three course meal in an old ballroom whilst being entertained by 5 string musicians and 2 opera singers who played/sang Mozart pieces. It was a fantastic evening. I loved the food, the wine, the music and the people we met!