I'm offering this picture as emblematic of my whole blog: photo-memories of my life, mainly the parts involving travel, as seen through the very limited but sometimes satisfying lens of my little Kodak Instamatic. Here you see a castle somewhere in Austria, from the train window on a trip from Vienna to Venice, 1972. To many this would be a throw-away photo because of the reflection. But I like its dreamy quality--even the magenta tint that has overtaken this particular box of slides.
My friend Mike Bavar and I left Prague for Vienna by bus. It was an interesting ride mainly for its brief stops in small, untouristed Bohemian towns that provided glimpses of daily life in a country "behind the Iron Curtain" in 1972. And the Bohemian countryside was certainly attractive.
Again, apologies for the magenta tint of these particular boxes; I have no idea why they have this problem when most of the other Kodachrome rolls developed at the same time do not.
I don't recall where our hotel was located, but the first photos I took of Vienna are all of buildings on or near the Ringstrasse, where we took a long walk in drizzly weather. This great boulevard is really a set of linked boulevards forming a polygon around the Inner Town; it was built, replacing ancient city walls and adjoining empty space, around the same time that Paris' boulevards were being constructed. The monumental buildings along the Ringstrasse, mostly built in the later 1800s, are in quite a variety of styles: neo-Gothic, neo-Classic, neo-Renaissance, etc. Below you see just a few of them: two photos of the Votive Church; two of the Rathaus (City Hall); two of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the great Vienna art museum; and the Burgtheater. We continued our walk by heading into the Innere Stadt, where I took a photo of a church I haven't been able to identify--I must have been struck by the typically Austrian clock tower. At the very heart of the Innere Stadt are the 1679 Plague or Trinity Column and the imposing St Stephen's Cathedral with its zigzag roof design. I took only one photo of the latter, catching just a fragment of the roof and the spire; surrounded by modern buildings, it's hard to see St Stephen's as a whole.
The next day we visited the Belvedere, the palace on high ground beyond the Ringstrasse and Inner Town. The great reason to see the palace, besides the views of Vienna from its gardens, is its collection of Gustav Klimt paintings. I didn't attempt to take photos of this dazzling collection (probably not permitted anyway; I would have needed a flash), but I did shoot the building itself and the bizarre sphinx statuary, with vistas of the city beyond.
One other photo is of a marching band that happened to be parading outside the gates of the Belvedere:
Walking back to the city center we passed a city park with some ducks, and eventually came to the great baroque Karlskirche on the Ringstrasse:
These are all the photos I took of Vienna, other than a couple that are too dim to be worth reprinting, thanks to the Instamatic's inability to handle rainy weather. I was glad to have visited the city, but overall I had been much more impressed by Prague. Maybe it was the grey weather, or the fact that we didn't see any musical performances. The highlight for me was visiting the Belvedere, for its Klimts and the views of the city spread out in the distance. To be sure, the Kunsthistorisches Museum was exciting to visit for its painting collection--many Bruegels among the Hapsburg Emperors' legendary collection. And the famous cafes and pastry shops were memorable, and I enjoyed having a Sachertorte at the Hotel Sacher. I got to visit Vienna a second time in 1989, and had the same mild overall impression--but on a third visit, in 2012, I really came to love Vienna. There were several reasons for this change of heart: getting to see a concert at the famed Musikverein and an opera at the Staatsoper; going on a self-guided walking tour of locations for one of my favorite movies, The Third Man; seeing the stunning baroque interior of the National Library, which in 1972 I didn't know existed; and enjoying a first-rate bus-and-walking tour of the city with an excellent guide. (This was part of our campus trip abroad to Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.)
The train from Vienna to Venice was in a way as memorable as the city itself. It was even more scenic than my train from Venice to Innsbruck in 1969. Below are the photos I took from the train window. As you will see, the land gets more ruggedly mountainous as we approach the Alps. A highlight (I took four pictures, or tried to, as we sped by) was the sight of Hochosterwitz, a castle complex on a steep hill that truly looked like an illustration for a fairy tale or Lord of the Rings.
While Munich, Prague and Vienna were all new to me, I would be seeing Venice for the second time. Certainly it was a joy to see it again, though the highlight of this stay would turn out to be a trip to a villa outside the city and then over to Verona. More about that in my next post.
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