Mirabell Gardens

The the last stop of the day: Mirabell Gardens. The palace was built in 1606 by Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich Raitenau, who wanted a place to meet his mistress, Salome Alt, outside of the old medieval city walls. He was deposed and arrested in 1612, and his successor evicted Frau Alt and her family, expanded the palace and renamed it. It was remodeled in a more Baroque style in the 1720s. Interesting historical side note: Eva Braun's sister Gretl married SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein here June 3, 1944 with Hitler, Himmler and "the Brown Eminence" Martin Bormann in attendance. Maybe they should have been paying closer attention to what was happening just across the English Channel... Americans would know Fegelein from the 2004 film Downfall, or maybe more likely, one of the many parodies of the bunker scene people are always dubbing over. They still hold weddings in the Marble Hall, and today the building is used for the most part as city offices.

The gardens are open to the public, and have been since the days of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria. If you're a fan of the Sound of Music, some of the scenes when Maria is teaching the children to sing were shot in the garden, specifically around the Pegasus fountain. Sound of Music tours are a big deal here, a lot of people come to take them, but it wasn't something on our list. The garden features boxwood gardens, mythological statues, and a dwarf garden. The latter was removed in the Nineteenth Century "as a consequence of the Enlightenment" according to the official Salzburg tourism page, but returned a hundred years later due to their value as historical pieces. Seventeen of the original twenty-eight are there, in the bastion garden, rather than their original spot.

We'd had it by this point, and headed back across the river to the hotel. Our goal had been to try and make it to around eight PM, and we succeeded. Day one complete with only minimal, and surmountable, disasters Czytaj więcej