Salzburg

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Salzburger Dom 1,500 points

  You will meet this one from three sides before you ever face the front, because the open stone wraps right around it. Come at it through the arches on the south flank rather than across the paving: it lands harder when you have been in the shade first. Then go in and look up. Main course.

• Haus für Mozart 500 points

  The whole festival quarter is dug into the cliff, and this is the piece of it you can stand right under without a ticket. Walk into the yard at the foot of the wall: sheer rock on one flank, doors on the other, and a stair climbing the face between them. In summer the yard belongs to everybody. In winter it is mine.

• Mozarts Geburtshaus 500 points

  Yellow, narrow, and impossible to miss in the busiest lane on this bank. Do not just join the queue at the door. Step back across the cobbles and look up: the shop signs hang far out over the street on wrought iron, because these buildings were too thin to spare any width for lettering. Then go in. I will wait out here with the ironwork.

• Museum der Moderne 500 points

  The plainest box on the skyline, parked along the ridge above the left bank like a loaf of white bread somebody set down and forgot. Two ways up: the quick one, and the footpath that winds you up the hillside in twenty minutes. Take the footpath. The path along the crest runs right past the entrance, and the view from it is free.

• Schloss Mirabell 500 points

  Do not stop at the railings. The pull here is the garden: stand at the top of the steps and the rock on the far side of the water drops neatly into the gap between the hedges, which somebody arranged on purpose a long time ago. Afterwards go inside and find the staircase. It is crawling with small stone figures, it is the most excessive object on this side of the river, and standing on it costs nothing.

• Hettwerbastei 250 points

  A ledge halfway up the quiet side of town, and one of the few high places here that costs nothing and has no queue. The climb to it is short and unkind. What you get for it is the entire opposite side laid out flat, roofs first, with the fortress sitting on top of the arrangement like a lid.

• Kajetanerplatz 250 points

  The far end of the left bank, where the crowd finally thins and the paving gets wider. Most visitors turn round before they get this far, which is exactly why I recommend it. Bring an empty bottle with you. There is a reason, and I am keeping it to myself.

• Makartplatz 250 points

  A wide open space on the right bank that most walkers cross at speed on their way to somewhere else. Slow down in the middle of it. One side is shut off by a church whose face curves inward instead of bulging out, which is a difficult and expensive way to close a space, and at the bus stop nobody ever looks at it. I do.

• Mozartsteg 250 points

  So narrow that two people have to be polite about it in the middle, and the middle is the place to stop. From there the whole left-hand skyline lines up in one row, and what is underneath you is the fastest thing in this town. Then keep going. Moving water under a street changes the texture, and I notice.

• Müllner Kirche 250 points

  The far north tip of this round, and a proper walk out to get there. Take the path by the water rather than the road: the tower keeps appearing and vanishing between the trees the entire way, which is a good trick for something that never moves. At the top you are well above the roofs, and everything you walked lies flat behind you.

• Sebastianskirche 250 points

  The busiest shopping lane on this side of the water has an unremarkable doorway in it that almost nobody uses. Go through. The noise stops dead on the other side, there are trees, and in the middle sits a small domed thing lined inside with coloured tiles. Two minutes off your route. Take them.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Everybody here started high up. The Celts sat on the Kapuzinerberg, the Rainberg, the Bürglstein and the Festungsberg, which makes sense if what you want is to be left alone. Rome arrived in 15 BC, emptied the hilltops and put a town down on the flat by the left bank instead, because a hilltop keeps you alive and a riverbank makes you rich. The valley opens into a basin here at the northern edge of the Alps, with the water cut straight through the middle of it and the hills standing round the rim. That is why this round has two halves and a crossing in between.

Sources: austria-forum.org, www.bda.gv.at

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

45–500

Rome. The town on the flat had municipal rights from about the year 45 and sat in the province of Noricum for four centuries. Then the administration came apart. A Christian community and a monastery are recorded here in the late 400s, and part of the old population simply moved back up onto the fortified terrace above the town, which is where the whole thing had started.

Sources: austria-forum.org

739–1803

The bishops, and then the bishops as princes. Salzburg became a bishop's seat in 739 and was raised to an archbishopric in 798. After that the churchmen spent five hundred years turning a diocese into a country: a king confirmed their jurisdiction in 1278, they issued their own body of law in 1328, and by 1342 an archbishop was calling the place his Land in writing. None of that was decided down in the lanes.

Sources: austria-forum.org, www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de

1803–1816

Thirteen years, four owners. The secularisation of 1803 ended the prince-archbishopric and made Salzburg the seat of an electorate. In 1805 it went to the Austrian empire, in 1810 Bavaria took possession, and in 1816 the Treaty of Munich handed it back to Austria. Whole countries changed hands over this valley in less time than it takes a lane to wear down a step.

Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de

1816–

Austria, at last, and slowly. The title said Duchy of Salzburg from 1816, but for decades it was administered as one district of the province next door, with the courts and the offices sitting in Linz. It became a crown land of its own in 1850, in practice 1861, and the city got its own municipal statute in 1869. Since November 1918 it has been a federal state, and the town I lie in is its capital.

Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, austria-forum.org

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The big squares around the cathedral are not generosity. They are holes. Archbishop Wolf Dietrich set out to turn a cramped late-Gothic town into a German Rome, and to clear the ground for those squares he had fifty-five burgher houses pulled down. So walking out of the tight lanes onto that open stone is walking out of the citizens' town and into the churchmen's one. Two towns, one Old Town, and I can taste the seam.

   Sources: austria-forum.org, www.bda.gv.at

2. In 996 the emperor gave this town three rights in one go: to hold a market, to take a toll, and to strike its own coin. That is three separate ways of earning a living off people walking past. I have exactly one, and it is slower than all of them.

   Sources: austria-forum.org

3. There were two rings of wall here, the first raised between the 11th and 13th centuries and the second between 1465 and 1480, with a further belt of works added in the 1620s and 1630s. Then in 1860 the city stopped counting as a fortress, and in 1866 the emperor made the town a present of the works between Schloss Mirabell and the Linzertor. They came down between 1867 and 1874, and the stone never left: it went into the riverbanks and the drains. A town that ate its own wall is a town I can learn from.

   Sources: www.stadt-salzburg.at, wiki.sn.at

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 127streets
• 1,569dots
• 24.8km of street
• 33.1km on foot
• 9.5hours at a stroll