The Salt of Salzburg

We took the 2-hour train ride to a place where the hills are actually alive with the sound of music. Yes, this is where the Sound of Music was filmed. The famous Von Trapp family lived not far from the center of town. As you stroll around you can still pick out many of the backdrops for scenes immortally captured on film. For some strange reason I couldn’t get “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” out of my head all day.

Salzburg is a city that is more the size of a large hamlet than a town. It is nestled where the Alps thrust up along with church spires from the verdant landscape at the border between Germany and Austria. Towering over this town is a huge white castle that is white as salt. Its importance is in the strategic controlling of salt during the Middle Ages. And this fortress is where the name of the town comes from Saltz (salt) Burg (fortress). It was built by the Catholic Church around 1077 as a fortress to protect both the town people and the precious salt that is mined near by. If you had salt in those days you had something that could preserve food. Salt was valuable enough to require a fortress that was so fortified that this fortress was never breached. Many tried but none were successful. For decades this secure fortress was added on to and expanded until it not only covered the mountaintop, it also draped down the extremely steep cliffs. With walls over 100 feet high, the fortress would last for centuries until it was voluntarily handed to Napoleon in the 1800’s.

In the evening we head back to Munich hitching a ride from Roberts friend, Roland who teaches music in Salzburg and spends his weekends in Munich. We stop on the way home to a huge lake resort. The weather is brisk with occasional rain showers. But that doesn’t dissuade us from walking along the lakeshore. As twilight sets in, we head for a restaurant on the waters edge for some traditional German dishes before heading back to Munich. The weather went from rain showers to rain, so we spent the next day visiting museums and trying to stay dry. I was excited to see a special exhibit of Vermeer paintings. But as it turns out there was only one Vermeer painting. The rest of exhibit were various painting collected in the 1800’s by Bavarian kings. Still a nice exhibit despite the let down of seeing just one Vermeer.