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Salzburg - Culture |
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If you're on a
musical pilgrimage, you can visit Mozart's birthplace, his home, the grave
of his father and widow, and the house of a person who once knew someone
who knew someone whose great-great grandfather once played second bassoon
in a Mozart opera. The Summer International Festival held in Salzburg in
July-August naturally gives his tunes a good workout. If you're looking
for kitsch, try The Sound of Music tour: ten bucks to the best
rendition of Julie Andrews singing `The Hills are Alive with the Sound of
Music'. Four km south of Salzburg's old town is the Baroque Hellbrunn
Palace, built in the 17th-century by bishop Marcus Sitticus. The
grounds contain ingenious trick fountains and water-powered figures thanks
to the bishop's strange fascination with soaking unsuspecting visitors.
Expect the tour guides to continue the bishop's perverse tradition. St Anton the Arlberg region comprises
several linked resorts and is considered to have some of the best skiing
in Austria. St Anton is the largest and least elitist of these resorts,
but even here budget travellers can kiss their savings goodbye amid the
easy-going atmosphere and vigorous nightlife. St Anton has good,
medium-to-advanced runs as well as nursery slopes on Gampen and Kapall.
The resort went down in skiing history as the place where Hannes Schneider
pioneered the `Arlberg method' in the early 20th century. This basically
involved skiing with your legs glued together and fortunately is no longer
used by the footloose crowds on the slopes today. St Anton is on the main
railway route from Bregenz to Innsbruck.
Eisriesenwelt Caves set at an elevation of
1640m, the Eisriesenwelt Caves are the largest accessible ice caves in the
world. They comprise more than 40km of explored passageways and 30,000
cubic m of ice. Entry to the caves is regulated and a 75-minute tour takes
in several immense caverns containing elaborate ice formations and frozen
waterfalls. The caves were first entered in 1879, but it was one Alexander
von Mork who pioneered the most extensive exploration: when he signed off,
his ashes were placed in an urn in the `cathedral' cave. Be sure to wear
warm clothes because the passageways are as close as you'll ever come to
feeling you've been trapped in your Westinghouse icebox. The caves are
open between May and early October and are located near Werfen.
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The
high point of a visit to Salzburg (literally and metaphorically) is a tour
of the 11th-century Hohensalzburg Castle, which stands on a rock
outcrop about 120m above the city. It's almost a separate village in its
own right, with all the usual self-sufficient accoutrements of a tiny
settlement like torture chambers, staterooms, a tower and two museums. On
the east side of the old town, the stunning Museum of Natural History
has the standard flora and fauna displays, good hands-on physics exhibits
and some stomach-churning deformed human embryos. To round off the grisly
experience, there are tours of the catacombs in the graveyard of the
9th-century St Peter's Abbey. 
Grossglockner Road, for a fantastic 50km
mountain tour, load up the car and head for the Grossglockner Road,
Austria's No1
panorama drama. The road was built between 1930 and 1935, but the course
it follows has been an important trading route between Germany and Italy
since the Middle Ages. Most of the juicy bits are in the Hohe Tauern
National Park where there are dramatic views of numerous unpronounceable
peaks, including the mighty Grossglockner which looms across the vast
tongue of the Pasterze Glacier and looks every centimetre of its 3797m.
The Grossglockner Road requires a toll and is open to traffic between May
and November. Start the journey in Zell am See and end in Heiligenblut.
Marionettes perform
some of the greatest operas in the Salzburg Marionette Theatre, using
records performed by magnificent
orchestras and singers. The Salzburg Marionette Theatre is older than the
Salzburg Festival and has a very high global reputation, generated mostly
by the many tours which take the theatre and its marionettes around the
globe. Operas performed by the Salzburg Marionettes seem to be more
magical than with live artists. "...the power that lifts them into
the air is greater than that which ties them to the earth ..."
(Heinrich von Kleist) In its magnificent baroque theatre, some 160
performances take place annually; theatre seasons in Salzburg are as
follows: Christmas to January, Easter, May to Sep/Oct. 