Vienna [antikvár]

Vienna and the VienneseVienna has always been a city of romance and legend. Part of the adventure of going there is discovering how much is true, how much fantasy.Are the Viennese really so elegant and worldly as they say? Do they still waltz to the music of Strauss? Do those horses at the Spanish Riding School actually walk on air? Do the taxi drivers really hum a few bars of The Magic Flute as they drive you to the opera? Does the Sachertorte chocolate cake literally melt in your mouth? Can that violin in the Heurigen wine garden really move a bank manager to tears?The answer to this kind of question is both yes and no. Romance and reality intermingle in Vienna. Even the 'Blue' Danube is brown for the most part, except for a small section siphoned off through Donaupark, which is as blue as the waltz promised us. Nothing in Vienna is straightforward!East-West CrossroadsHistorically, Vienna has always been a crossroads of eastern and western European civilization. According to the wily 19th-century statesman Met-ternich, the Balkans begin at the Rennweg, a busy shopping street leading eastwards from the centre of town.A melting pot long before New York, Vienna has perpetually defied a simple national label. As capital of the Habsburg empire, Vienna was home not only to Slavs and Hungarians, but also to Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Flemings. Its language is German - with a distinctive Viennese touch - but the city and the people obviously have too much Balkan and Latin in them to be grouped with Hamburg, Berlin or Frankfurt. The wind that sweeps down the Landstrasse has the unmistakable bite of the steppes, but by the time it reaches the centre of town, as often as not, it's been tamed by a warm breeze from the south. At the foot of the lofty Stephansdom 5