Vienna Day 1
By breakfast time, the boat had docked at a long quai in Vienna which included several Viking River Cruise ships and others with Swiss, Italian and French companies. The Danube doesnt run through the city center, so in late morning we were bussed downtown, divided into groups by differing mobility capacity. Jan and I were led through the crowded streets listening to a guide’s halting comments through a radio earphone.
As our procession arrived at St. Stephen’s Cathedral the morning’s rainshowers were giving way to a brilliant sky illuminating lacy patterns of light and shadow on the stone.
Inside the dark interior, Jan discovered a tucked-away portrait of the structure’s 1513 architect she identified by his square and compasses, Anton Pilgram.
The cathedral plaza extended pedestrian walkways in several directions surrounded by elegant 19th century buildings.
After lunch and a nap back at the boat, I returned downtown by metro to comparison shop for a new belt with rudimentary German and wander around. Most of the buildings are “neo” in fashion–hybrids of classical, gothic, moorish, and renaissance styles.
I came upon the Sacher coffee house, the haunt of Vienna’s fin de siecle intellectual and artistic elite
A stark sculpture installation across the street commemorates the horrors of Nazi occupation, largely supported by Austrian natives. It recalled my mother’s story that her parents’ family drove to Vienna to flee from their Stuttgart ancestral home in 1938 and woke up in the morning to streets full of Storm Troopers and Swastika banners.
(They managed to get back into their car and drive the other way to find refuge in Switzerland).
Around a corner I came to the Hofburg Garten, fronting one of the city’s grand palaces built during Vienna’s prominence as the industrial, economic and cultural powerhouse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) and of the Habsburg Monarchy–1526-1918. Most were reduced to ruins by Allied bombing but valued enough to be fully restored.
Viewed from the terrace of a glass botanical conservatory/restaurant, the garden included formal hedges as well as lawns and trees welcoming picnikers, all of it surrounded by symmetrical rows of buildings.
I longed to return there but we had only two days.
Passing through a street arcade on the way back to the metro, I lingered at a courtyard with a central fountain.
Two sides were enclosed by an ornate facade.
Around the corner a sign advertising an upcoming performance of The Marriage of Figaro revealed that this was the Vienna StaatsOper, the first building erected along Ringstrasse, the reknowned thoroughfare housing institutions dedicated to art, science, education and government constructed between 1860 and 1890. It too was largely destroyed by Allied bombing and subsequently restored.
In the metro station I was surrounded by multiple images of a model for Maybelline mascara whom I knew as a baby in San Luis Obispo, the daughter of longtime friends .
