Magna on the Danube (Christmas)

The city of Bratislava holds a rich history for Hungary and its surrounding countries. Visit the castle of Bratislava, built in the 9th century, it was once home to Hungarian royalty, until a fire nearly destroyed it in 1811. It is now a museum and national monument.

The capital of Hungary, Budapest was formed by the unification of two cities, Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube River. This sparkling eastern European capital has culture, nightlife, gambling, folk art and fine cuisine to offer. More than 4 million tourists each year are drawn by such attractions as the Buda Castle quarter, over 200 museums, around 80 geothermal springs, the largest synagogue in Europe and more.

Located on the Danube in northeast Austria, it is an important commerical center and the country’s third largest city.

Large city in southern Germany. Home of the Octoberfest and German gateway to the Alps.

Human settlements have existed here at the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz rivers ever since prehistoric times. In this millennium the city was considerably enlarged by the prince bishops of Passau, who made it their royal residence and capital of the largest Danube diocese. The wonderful Baroque buildings that dominate the city today were built after the great fire of 1662. One of the most striking is cathedral of St. Stephan, which boasts the world’s biggest church organ. One of the best ways to enjoy the magic of Passau is with a sightseeing tour by ship.

How is it that Vienna’s mood manages to be at once so sanguinary and so sanguine? Somehow the city’s fondness for the morbid and the bizarre never seems at odds with its sunny stability. Rather, all Vienna works the way its graveyards and its Graben work. The order here is rich, organic, and complex. Death takes its place alongside life, the old alongside the new, the eccentric alongside the conventional, the mad alongside the sane.

Even the city’s geography is orderly in an organic, inspiriting way. Vienna is a series of concentric circles, or, more accurately, half circles, rippling outward from its center in the inner town (where Vienna began as the ancient Roman camp of Vindobona) to the Vienna Woods themselves, which are the ultimate foothills and fingerlings of the Alps. At the nucleus, the first district, you find this vigorous hodgepodge of old and new, sublimity and grotesquerie, urbanity and coziness. Around it, in a protective and officious circle, there is the Ringstrasse, a collection of public and private buildings, all planned nearly simultaneously (in the mid nineteenth century) on an enormous scale. The buildings are charmless but imposing, and they were all designed as though they were theatrical sets, with an eye to the illustrious past: fake Renaissance for the university, fake early Baroque for the Burgtheater (the Baroque being the period when common-
ers joined with the gentry in flocking to the theater), fake Gothic for the Votive Church and the Town Hall (since the medieval commune represented the source of Viennese government), fake Greek for the democratic institution of Parliament. At once expansive and forbidding, the Ringstrasse hems in the vibrant inner town and formalizes it. It
was built where the fortress walls of Vienna once stood, and even today it acts as a sort of wall, inside which the city carries on with the appropriate metropolitan bustle, and outside which Vienna can sprawl and relax and indulge itself. Small wonder that the next ring beyond the Ringstrasse, the Gurtel, is best known as the circle where streetwalkers ply their trade.

Beyond Gurtel, Vienna fans out into neighborhoods, pleasant, almost bucolic districts that retain the character of their past lives as quaint Austrian villages. There are workers’ regions (including the beautiful and still-functioning Karl Marx-Hof housing project, built during the utopian twenties, when the city was often referred to as Red Vienna) and posh residential areas. Good mansion viewing can be had in the nineteenth district, where you can and should visit the Gey-muller-Schlossel. Although its clock collection is its gratest draw, the Geymuller-Schlossel is one of Vienn’a most delicious repositories of Biedermeier furniture, the igenious and beautiful stuff made to amuse the upper middle class during the early nineteenth century.

Vilshofen an der Donau is located in the German district of Passau, at the southern edge of the Bavarian forest on the banks of the Danube. The friendly town plays host to a variety of celebrations each year, such as the Folk Festival, annual Christmas markets, and one of the grandest fireworks displays in the region on the second weekend of July.

Weissenkirchen in der Wachau is located in northern Austria on the bands of the Danube River. With a name that means “white church,” it’s not surprising that its namesake edifice dominates the charming town.