Salzburg
Mozart's city — a baroque old town between the river and the Alps.
Salzburg is guarded by its own clichés: Mozart chocolates, The Sound of Music, the fortress on every postcard. You have to get through them, and then you're standing in one of the most beautiful small cities in Europe.
The old town is baroque, narrow and crossed on foot in twenty minutes. The Getreidegasse is crowded; the lanes two corners away are not. Above it all the Mönchsberg, reached by lift, where you walk through woods above the city as if you were in the countryside.
In summer Salzburg belongs to the Festival — six weeks in which the city becomes more expensive, fuller and more serious. In autumn and winter it belongs to itself again: coffee houses, Christmas markets without kitsch, and the first snow on the Untersberg.
Salzburg is a city for two nights that you do three times in a life.
We come to Salzburg for the opera and stay for the city afterwards — empty lanes at midnight, the lit fortress, one last glass. The Blaue Gans in the Getreidegasse is the house for it: 350 years an inn, today an art hotel that doesn't treat art as decoration. You live right in the middle and are still behind thick walls. For the Festival, book half a year ahead. Otherwise: December. Salzburg does winter well.
