Part 14 - Touring Vienna by Bus
Bus tour
of
the Ringstrasse
After I finally tore myself away from the Lippizanner Museum, we didn't
have a lot of time for lunch before we needed to meet the pickup van
for
the city bus tour. We asked at the hotel for a quick place to eat
lunch,
and they sent us to a Gasthaus (sort of like a pub with substantial
food)
a few blocks down the street. It wasn't all that fast, so I had to
gobble
down my beef goulash, but we did make it back in time to catch the
tour.
The bus tour company had a
clever system. They picked up all of their
riders at the individual hotels and brought us to a central terminal,
where
we all get distributed to the different tour busses according to
language.
It took a little time, but it was worth it to get a tour guide we could
understand.
As we boarded the
English-language tour bus, we were pleased to run
into the same American couple we'd met this morning at the Spanish
Riding
School. So we sat next to them and chatted a bit more.
The tour started by driving us
around Vienna on the Ringstrasse - the
grand boulevard that follows the outline of the old city walls. From
the
Ringstrasse, we could see nearly all of the important cultural,
political,
and religious buildings in the city, including the Opera House, the
Parliament,
many museums, the back side of the Hofburg, and many of the city's 800
parks.
One of the reasons that Vienna
is such a grand city is that it has had
an unusually stable history under a dynasty of Hapsburg rulers who
amassed
great wealth during their long reign. Beginning with the Holy Roman
Empire
in 1438, the Hapsburgs ruled for nearly 500 years until they gave up
the
throne after World War I.
The greatest flowering of
Vienna took place after the defeat of the
Turkish invaders in 1683, in a battle right outside the gates of the
city.
When the Turkish threat was removed, the city was able to expand beyond
its walls, and many elegant palaces were constructed.In the reign of
the
Emperor Franz Joseph, the last city defenses were torn down and the
Ringstrasse
was built in its place.
We learned about one of the
icons of Vienna - the tragic Empress Elisabeth,
nicknamed 'Sisi', who died over 100 years ago. Sisi was the Princess Di
of the 19th century, and her image still appears everywhere on
souvenirs
of Vienna. She is usually depicted as in a portrait that hangs in the
drawing
room of the Hofburg, dressed in a full-skirted white ball gown, with a
diadem of stars in her long dark hair.
Sisi was the wife of Emperor
Franz Joseph. Her only son, Crown Prince
Rudolf, was found dead with his mistress in a hunting lodge in the
Bavarian
woods in 1889. This has always been a great mystery. The official
explanation
is suicide, but some believe that he was murdered to cover up his
involvement
in a treasonous plot with Serbian rebels. After his death, Sisi
travelled
a lot, but she was killed in Switzerland by an Italian anarchist,
leaving
the Emperor and the nation heartbroken.
The
Schonbrunn
and Belvedere Palaces
The
highlight of the tour was a long stop at the Schonbrunn Palace, the
famous
summer residence of the Hapsburgs on the outskirts of the city. We were
escorted on a formal tour of 20 or so of the state apartments (out of
the
1400 total rooms!) and then had an hour free to wander the grounds.
The Schonbrunn was designed in
1696, and was painted yellow because
that was Maria Theresa's favorite color. This is where the 6-year-old
Mozart
performed for her in the Hall of Mirrors in 1762, and where the
Congress
of Vienna danced at night in the Grand Gallery, lit with 1000 candles.
In a more recent political meeting, Kennedy and Krushchev met in the
Grand
Gallery in 1961, in the first meeting of the east and west since World
War II. The Grand Gallery was damaged during the war (a bomb fell
through
the ceiling fresco), but it has since been restored to its original
magnificence.
The
grounds were extensive, and an hour only gave us time to scratch the
surface.
My father was a little tired, so he settled onto a nice park bench
under
the trees, and I walked with our American acquaintances down the long
promenade,
past the Neptune fountain (which was under repair and shrouded in
canvas),
and up the hill toward the Gloriette. But we only made it part way up
before
it was time to turn around and return to the bus. The weather had been
gradually improving since the morning, and it was very pleasant to be
outdoors
among flowers and trees.
These pictures only show a
small fraction of the grounds, which extend
off into the trees on either side of the promenade. The whole thing is
now a public park, and contains a theater, an orangery, a playground, a
rose garden, Roman ruins, a breakfast pavilion, Tyrolean house, palm
house,
butterfly house, botanical gardens, a restaurant in the Gloriette, a
public
swimming pool, and a zoo! There is a city transit stop not very far
from
the front gates, so this would be a great place to spend a nice day if
you had more time than we had.(By the way, those hills off to the left
in the view from the Gloriette is the location of the famous Vienna
Woods.)
We had another short stop at the Belvedere Palace, the summer residence
of Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose brilliant leadership was key to the
defeat
of the Turks in 1683. Like the Schonbrunn, it was designed by Johann
Lukas
von Hildebrant, the court architect, and was built in the early 1700's.
It, too, has an extensive formal gardens with statuary and water
features.
We did not have an opportunity to visit the interior, which now houses
a collection of 19th and 20th century art, including a fine collection
of Gustav Klimt. There is a second building at the far end of the
gardens,
the "Lower Belvedere", which houses a collection of Baroque Art.
A
quiet evening,
with demonstration
On
our return to the hotel, we decided to rest a
bit, so I took a short walk to find a diet coke and a copy of the
International
Herald Tribune to read. The concierge had not been able to get us
tickets
to the opera, and my father wasn't interested in attending any of the
concerts
staged in costume for tourists, so we had a quiet evening. We did have
a very nice dinner in the hotel's restaurant, which turned out to be
Milanese-style
Italian (which is not my father's favorite - he prefers southern
Italian
cooking), but I enjoyed my ravioli stuffed with chicken, cheese and
spinach,
in a mushroom sauce.
After dinner, we took a short
stroll around the
Stephansplatz, but did not go too far. It was a lovely night, but the
plaza
was filled with police and people setting up sound trucks for a planned
anti-NATO demonstration. (Remember, this was during the bombing in
Yugoslavia.)
So we decided we'd better get back into the hotel before things got too
exciting.
As it turned out, the
demonstration was quite
peaceful, without too much shouting, and with lots of nice singing. It
was still going on when I dozed off to sleep.
Go back to the top
Go to the next section: Two Lofty
Buildings