The Last Day in Salzburg

Thursday September 9th

The kiwis and Ber Lin wanted to spend a day at home with Hemi so Mary will write the blog today. It was the last day in Salzburg and the last day to use the card so there were things that had to be seen.

The first one was the Mozart Residence. This was near the Mirabell Palace so we caught a bus to this area and found it easily. It was here that the family moved in Salzburg when the previous house in the old town became too small. This was a spacious town apartment and the audio guide commentary was about the years when the Father, Leopold , was taking his two exceptionally talented children all over Europe by coach to perform concerts in the courts. The family actually had seven children but only two survived, Mozart and his sister Maria. She would have been considered outstanding to a much greater degree than she was had she not always been in the shadow of her prodigy younger brother Wolfgang. This visit filled in all the gaps as the house we visited in Vienna was the one where Mozart had lived as an adult for a short time once he was married.

From here we walked over the foot bridge back into the old town. The narrow streets were crowded with tourist in tour parties as usual. We had our lunch in one of the squares near the festival halls where they have regular concerts and of course the famous Salzburg festival. Along from here was a very interesting toy and musical instrument museum. The toys were arranged in groups. There were old tine toys, wooden toys, paper theatres, dolls houses etc. The most interesting was a dolls house in a huge cabinet from the 17th century. There was also a circus exhibition tracing the history of the circus over the years.

The other section was the musical instruments. There were over 400 of these from four centuries. They were well displayed but had no English explanations, but it was easy to work out what they were.

A little way on was an elevator that took you up through the hill to the museum of modern art. There were actually three elevators side by side and they were very modern, not like the Durie Hill elevator. At the top was a panorama terrace that gave a wonderful view of Salzburg. Once up there we decided to visit the Museum of Modern Art. There was an interesting exhibition called Pressart. All based around art in the press or using items of press to create a new work of art. Quite a few artists had used newspapers and magazines in really imaginative ways. The major exhibition was the work of Max Ernst one of the surrealist artists of the 20th century. He mainly illustrated the books he created about his artist friends.


From here we visited the Residenz. This is the former palace of Salzburg’s Prince Archbishops. We were taken through these 15 rooms of the state apartments with a comprehensive audio guide that described most of the objects on each room. It was a journey through two centuries of decorative style, renaissance, baroque and classical. There was a lot to see and the archbishops made sure they lived in style. Mozart had performed his first concerts in one of the rooms when he was only 6 and of course performed there many times over the years as he was growing up in Salzburg.

The last major sight was the Dom. We did not spend a lot of time in here. It has been rebuilt over the years and the present one dates from 1628. It is a model of Baroque architecture north of the Alps. When it was built it was designed to hold 10,000 people which was more than the entire population of Salzburg at the time. Today the population is 160,000 and there are 6 million visitors a year. Mozart played the great Baroque organ here.


Leaving the Cathedral area we walked down to the Mozart Bridge which is early 20th century and was used as a location in the Sound of music. This took us across the river and we caught a bus back to the railway station and then back to camp. It was not too late in the day so we both spent time on the diaries. I am making a scrap book but don’t get time to write much extra in it. Tomorrow we leave Salzburg and make a short trip to Munich. We packed as much as we could into four days and still missed a few things but we simply ran out of time and energy!