Salzburg is another pretty town in the mountains – or at least there are mountains on one side of the city, as you can see from this view from the castle at the top of the town:
The museum in the castle had an impressive display about torture, including a number of instruments – another reminder that Europe has a history of incredible violence and inhumanity, even in a place with pretty streets like this:
There was another baroque cathedral too, this one a little on the fusty side. And the picture below is the house where Mozart was born; I didn’t go in because I figured that, although he wrote some amazing music, he might as well have been born in one house as in another…
Whatever is happening in other parts of Europe, there is certainly no shortage of money in Salzburg – tonight all the restaurants in all the squares are full of people eating and drinking, late into the evening.
Curved World 
Lovely, there are some who would maintain that the torture is necessary to make those streets pretty – life’s little paradoxes, hey? Always remember Umberto Ecco’s book The Name of the Rose – good insight into those times. Also William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire was excellent.
well some would no doubt – Donald Rumsfeld? And many would maintain that whatever the history, it doesn’t have to be that way – the European Union has its flaws but it is at least based on the noble sentiment that that kind of stuff must never happen again…whether it will be capable of maintaining that during this century is another question, but at least one with a better frame of reference than existed a century ago…
thanks for the book tips – I am reading up quite a storm sitting on trains so if I run out of reading matter, I will look out for those two. Incidentally, if you can bear to look (though don’t envy the cool – it has been in the 30s here) my last entry was on Melk, which is where I believe one of the main characters in Name of the Rose was from…
Ok Vienna here I come…