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By the Way: Travel Letters Written During Several Journeys Abroad cover

By the Way: Travel Letters Written During Several Journeys Abroad

Chapter 53: AUSTRIA
By Agness Greene Foster
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About This Book

A collection of travel letters recounting sojourns across England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Greece, and European and Asiatic Turkey. The writer blends shipboard anecdotes and personal impressions with practical observations about accommodations, local customs, and travel routines, offering vivid sketches of towns, monuments, and everyday scenes. The revised edition adds further journeys and provides a list of pensions, a bibliography, and numerous illustrations that complement the episodes. The tone is conversational and episodic, alternating personal reflection with useful advice for those contemplating a first trip across the Atlantic.

AUSTRIA

All places that the eye of heaven visits

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.

Shakspere, Richard II.,

Act I, Scene 3, Line 275.

VIENNA:

We arrived in Vienna with the Emperor. In fact, we acted as his advance guard for some time, his train following ours. The Emperor himself was but a small part of the show, for the officers of his suite outshone all else, and were swagger to a degree. German and Austrian army officers are imposing anywhere, but especially so on horseback.

Vienna is a city within a city, for the fortifications which surrounded the old town have been torn down and replaced by a broad boulevard which separates the ancient from the modern portion. Within this Ring-Strasse the streets are narrow and the houses mediæval; without, you will find one of the most inviting cities of Europe.

Vienna is gay, sparkling and fascinating. Its opera and its shops are world renowned, and it is a close rival of Paris in setting the modes.

Nowhere in all Europe can so much beauty and grandeur of mountain, forest and stream be crowded into one day as during a sail on the Danube from Linz to Vienna.