My knee seemed a bit better this morning, so we decided to take the city tour that has been organised for the morning and then go off to the hospital in the afternoon. So at 9am, I clambered clumsily into a bus and we set off to be driven round the Ringstrasse, a circular boulevard which rings the city, created in 1859 when the defensive wall round the city was demolished. Many wealthy people had their prestigious town houses built along the Ringstrasse. The architecture here is absolutely marvellous.
This is a fairly typical building.
One of the first public buildings we saw was the Opera House.
It was the first of the new monumental buildings on the Ringstrasse, and was build in what was referred to as 'Italian Renaissance Style'. There are guided tours, but I doubt we will have time to take one, there are too many other things to see.
As well as a rather grand City Hall ( which I missed photographing when a bus got in the way) there is an imposing neo-classical Parliament building.
And yes, that is a statue of Athena in the front of it. There are also winged figures in chariots on top of it. On the left of my photo is a bronze statue of a horse tamer, and there is another on the right somewhere which I think might be hidden by the flagpole. They symbolise the Members of Parliament who have to keep their emotions under control during parliamentary sessions!
I think the architecture in this city must be second to none. It is just stuffed with baroque, neo-classical and neo-Gothic buildings, not to mention the many built in Art Nouveau or Art Deco style after people became tired of the older styles and rebelled against them. I have far more photos than I'll be able to post here, and I tomorrow I hope to get some better ones than I've been able to take today out of the bus window.
The bus took us next to the Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Hapsburg Emperors, which was built in the late 17th century on a more modest estate originally acquired in the previous century.
As you can see, it is huge and built in the baroque style. Inside it is rococo, with huge and imposing rooms full of paintings and frescos and absolutely dripping in high relief decoration adorned with gold leaf. Our tour guide told us that 5 kilos of gold were used in the gold leaf decoration. It's a real shame that no photos are allowed inside, but I imagine my camera wouldn't do the place justice anyway.
The most imposing room of all is the grand gallery, 133 feet (40 metres) long and 33 feet (10 metres) wide, painted white with huge quantities of gold leaf decorations in very high relief, three enormous ceiling frescos and a number of huge chandeliers reflected in the mirrors around the walls. This room can be hired out and is sometimes used for public functions, and we are going to a music concert there tomorrow night!
After our tour round the imperial rooms, we went outside to have a brief look at the gardens, which are extremely extensive. We didn't have time for much, as we only had a short time before we were back on the bus for more sightseeing. We were driven round more sights, and also had a very brief walk round some of the centre of the old town.
We were able to walk past the stables of the Spanish Riding School.
We were fortunate in being able to see some of the Lipizzaner stallions being brought out for exercise. It was quite strange to me to see these horses living in the city centre like this, but I suppose in the past a lot of horses lived in stables in towns.
The Riding School is near a wing of the Imperial Palace called St Michael's Gate, which now houses Imperial apartments and some museums,
This is another imposing baroque building, with four groups of Hercules statues in front.
We hurried back to the bus which returned us to the hotel, from where we took a taxi to the Vienna General Hospital so somebody could look at my knee. The knee was X-rayed and fortunately I was told it is nothing serious and should clear up in a couple of weeks - just in time for me to come home, in fact! We then spent some time finding our way home by U-bahn, the equivalent of the Tube I suppose.
Tomorrow we intend to look at some museums.
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