VIENNA TOURIST

In and around the Old City

The "Old City" is Vienna's "First District". It is surrounded by the "Ring", a circular, very wide avenue with representational buildings, which replaced the medieval city walls. About a third of Vienna's buildings fell to the bombs of World War II, but this area has been splendidly restored.

Vienna Parks

Vienna has many beautiful parks. They are meticulously maintained by city hall, and frequently used by just about every Viennese - no wonder when you consider how small and dark some of the old Viennese apartments are. Three of the parks - the ones on the Ring to which the tourists flock - are shown here: the Burggarten, the Volksgarten and the Stadtpark.

Museum Quarters

The "Museumsquartier" opened only a short time ago and already attracts many tourists. So we had to go there, of course. The quarter used to be the imperial stables and then an industrial fairground - and it shows. Its new buildings house two large collections of modern art. Its old buildings accommodate modern artists and those who want to be. In fact, they wouldn't have it any other way. It's much more comfortable to discuss the superiority of modern art in a good old apartment than in a lousy modern one.

Belvedere

The Belvedere ("beautiful view") was the palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, "Habsburg's Sword" against the Turks. Nowadays it houses medieval, baroque and modern painting collections. Tourists mostly visit the "Gallery of the 19th and 20th Centuries" in the Upper Belvedere for a look at Gustav Klimt's paintings. Though ransacked recently by foreign political correctness, it still represents by far the largest collection of his works. Tourists also like to look at Schiele and Kokoschka and admire the Belvedere pool, while Viennese retain a sentimental attachment for Waldmüller and Makart and relax in the adjacent Botanical Garden.

Schönbrunn

Schönbrunn ("beautiful spring") served first as a hunting lodge and later as the summer residence of the Habsburg emperors. It is now owned by the state who, following global marching orders, turned its operation over to a private company.

The three places (with links arranged vertically) are Dürnstein and Waidhofen a.d. Ybbs in Lower Austria, and Admont in Styria . The choice of place is incidental: I just happened to visit there. While all three are pretty and well worth the trip, the same could be said of dozens of other places in Austria.

Remarks

Anxious to preserve my image as a tourist and unwilling to carry much weight beyond my own, I acquired these photographs with a typical point-and-shoot camera (Olympus 160G, under $ 100) while taking my inlaws sightseeing through Vienna.

The snapshots outside Vienna - with the exception of the trip to Dürnstein - were taken with the same camera during three days of reunion with my highschool classmates for our golden graduation anniversary.

These pictures are dedicated to Mag. Roswitha Helmberg and her crew for their warm welcome and fabulous organization of the event.

And it is a pleasant duty to acknowledge the best editor I ever had, Gottfriede Fürst, M.A., to whom I am most grateful for her willingness to gladly shoulder the responsibility for the Vienna Tourist's split infinitives and conjunctiva at the start of a sentence.

The background of this page shows an old Austrian coat-of-arms from the oldest part of the Imperial Palace (Hofburg, Schweizertor) in Vienna.