Belvedere....Klimt, Schiele and the middle ages

An odyssey within an odyssey....the subway of Vienna! A three day pass will now show us the bowels of Vienna and will ferry us from hither to yon even faster than before.

First, to Belvedere, a jewel of a castle. Now, Vienna is lousy with castles and ornamentation and excesses in architecture [a little as if Paris had been squeezed into a much smaller space] but Belvedere is exquisite.

And the castle is just the frame...here is the largest collection of Klimt paintings, including The Kiss, and a sizable collection of Schiele's large oils. But I was fascinated by the large collection of medieval paintings, 13th century...seeing the use of gold in these paintings,it is not hard to imagine where Klimt's love of gold stems from, surrounded as he was by these paintings.


Our new Austrian friends, Hugo an Doris Brugger, who had undertaken to introduce us to the magic of public transportation, now took us off to the Prater, the giant amusement park of Vienna...from the sublime to the ridiculous! The Riesenrad is not to be missed....unfortunately Q has refused to load any more photos, so you don't get to see the view from the top!

Still to come...the Hundertwasser house, the Lippizaner and the Vienna boy's Choir...and did I tell you we saw Hello Dolly?