Christmas cheers are fading, Christmas dinners have been cleared away, and most Christmas trees will soon be demobbed. But as soon as one annual ritual is over, it is already time for another one: we are entering the season of New Year resolutions. If you are still looking for a cheering splash of coulour, here…
The key difference between small cities and large cities resembles the difference between a single song and an album collection. Nice in the south of France is an excellent example for the single: attractive and catchy, but essentially a play on one motive or melody. Paris, conversely, unites a wide range of different themes: luxurious…
Did they meet? That is always the question when we read about two famous people who were sharing some sort of geographical proximity at one time or another. Adolf Hitler and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (“the limits of my language are the limits of my world”) went to the same school in Linz. Anton Czekhov…
When we first visited Siena, as part of a sponsored organized tour, we were taken for a walk down the high street straight into a museum, came out 2 hours later and went, more or less, directly back to the bus. No disrespect to our hosts (one branch of the large and sprawling tree of…
William Shakespeare is arguably the world’s greatest writer, but he is also literature’s great man of mystery. We know almost all of his plays and poems, but little of the man himself. Unusually for a man of letters, we do not know his “philosophy” and where he stood on the great issues of the day…
Paris, as we have documented many times, has practically everything that makes a city worthwhile visiting: great art, great food, great history, even – believe it or not – great one-day hikes. More than enough of the latter, in fact, to fill nearly a whole website. Considering all that, it feels almost rude to voice…
After last week’s long, hard slough through Vienna’s musical history, today we will be offering you something completely different. A short Vienna walk which is as short as it is sweet – in the spirit of 19th century concerts where it was not at all frowned upon to round up the performance of a serious…
In this week’s trip around Vienna City of Music, we shall leave the Austrian capital’s city centre and stay on its periphery before we branch out, encountering different faces of residential Vienna. As always on these city walks, you should keep your eyes open – there is much to discover. All large cities – not…
If Paris is the City of Light, then Vienna must be the City of Music. Every day, the Austrian capital hosts music performances for 10,000 people – and a grand total of 15,000 musical events per year. But Vienna is the City of Music in another way, too. There is no other place on earth…
Budapest and Vienna have a lot in common. The two cities share a lot of (Imperial) history and architectural influences … … but there is one big difference: the Danube, which is said to bypass Vienna rather than “flow through it”, lies very much at the heart of the Hungarian capital. The Danube also divides…