Beautiful, Ancient Salzburg

Salzburg Cathedral

The river, the mountains, the medieval buildings, Salzburg is an amazing and beautiful place. Yesterday was our first full day in Salzburg and so we took a walking tour of the city led by a wonderful guide who was very knowledgeable about the city’s history and genuinely very proud of her home. We learned that Salzburg was originally a Roman settlement and then an early Christian town. The first monastery, St Peter’s, was built in the 800’s. Since then there have been many churches built in this relatively small city and it has remained predominantly Roman Catholic because it was its own sovereign city-state for hundreds of years. We visited the largest cathedral, Salzburger Dom, which was built in just 14 years in the 17^th century. It has a beautiful, elaborately decorated interior in the Baroque style and is modeled after the St Peter's Basilica in Rome with large frescos. I found it interesting when our guide told us that during World War Two an Ally bomb was accidentally dropped onto the cathedral’s main dome. Miraculously the bomb did not explode on impact but dropped through the cathedral down into the catacombs before it detonated. Thus only the dome and floor had to be rebuilt and the rest of the church is original. The reconstruction took 14 years in the 1900’s yet it took the same amount of time to build the entire cathedral 300 years before. Pretty amazing. The cathedral also has an impressive five organs. Mozart was employed by the Prince-bishop of Salzburg and so he likely played each one of those organs.

Being his birthplace, Mozart is everywhere in Salzburg. Every other shop in the city center has Mozart’s image in the window. He is most often associated with a type of candy named after him, Mozart Kuglen, which are balls of pistachio marzipan covered with chocolate and hazelnut. After the tour we went to the original shop which has made the candies by hand since the 1800’s, they were rich but delicious. Another interesting story related to the composer our guide told us is that when the statue of Mozart was made about 50 years after his death, they had to delay placing the statue in the square because as they were digging the foundation the workers discovered ruins of a mosaic floor from an ancient Roman villa. I was aware before that Salzburg is the oldest city we will traveled to, nevertheless it is hard to conceive just how old the city actually is and I am amazed by how much and how well preserved the history is here. That night we had a dinner concert featuring arias from Mozart’s more famous operas in Europe’s oldest restaurant, opened in the 9th century.