Day Trip to Salzburg
In the Neustadt of Salzburg, which is also called Andräviertel, north of the Mirabell Gardens, there is a heaped, modeled lawn area, the landscaped, so-called Kurpark, where space around the Andräkirche was created after the razing of the former large bastions. The spa garden contains several older trees such as winter and summer linden, Japanese cherry, robinia, katsura tree, plane tree and Japanese maple.
A footpath dedicated to Bernhard Paumgartner, who became known through his biographies about Mozart, runs along the border with the old town and connects Mariabellplatz with the entrance from the Kurpark to the small ground floor, the northern part of the Mirabell Gardens. However, before you enter the gardens you may want to find a public restroom first.
If you look at Salzburg from above you can see that the city lies on the river and is bordered on both sides by small hills. In the southwest by an arc of a circle consisting of Festungsberg and Mönchsberg and in the northeast by Kapuzinerberg.
The fortress mountain, Festungsberg, belongs to the northern edge of the Salzburg Pre-Alps and consists largely of Dachstein limestone. Mönchsberg, Monks’ Hill, consists of conglomerate and connects to the west of the fortress mountain. It was not dragged away by the Salzach Glacier because it stands in the shadow of the fortress mountain.
The Kapuzinerberg, on the right side of the river like the fortress mountain, belongs to the northern edge of the Salzburg Limestone Pre-Alps. It consists of steep rock faces and a broad crest and is largely made up of coarsely layered Dachstein limestone and dolomite rock. The scrubbing effect of the Salzach Glacier gave the Kapuzinerberg its shape.
The Mirabell Gardens are often the first place to visit on a day trip to Salzburg. Buses arriving in Salzburg City let their passengers disembark at the T-junction of Paris-Lodron street with Mirabell Square and Dreifaltigkeitsgasse, the bus terminal north. In addition there is a car park, the CONTIPARK Parkplatz Mirabell-Congress-Garage, at Mirabell Square of which the exact address is Faber Straße 6-8. This is the link to get to the car park with google maps. Just across the street at Mirabell Square number 3 there is a public restroom that is free. This link to google maps gives you the exact location of the public restroom to assist you in finding it in the basement of a building below shade providing trees.
A neo-baroque marble staircase, using parts of the balustrade from the demolished city theater and unicorn statues, connects the Kurgarten in the north with the small ground floor of the Mirabell Gardens in the south.
The unicorn is an animal that looks like a horse with a horn on its forehead. It is said to be a fierce, strong and splendid animal, so fleet of foot that it can be caught only if a virgin maiden is placed before it. The unicorn leaps into the virgin’s lap, she suckles it and leads it to the king’s palace. The terrace steps were used as a hopping musical scale by Maria and the von Trapp children in the Sound of Music.
Two giant stone unicorns, horses with a horn on their head, lying on their legs guard the „Musical Steps“, the gate of the north entrance to the Mirabell Gardens. Little, but imaginative girls have fun riding them. The unicorns just ideally lie flat on the stairs so that little girls can step on them directly. The gateway animals seem to fuel girls‘ imaginations. A hunter only can lure the unicorn with a pure young virgin. The unicorn being attracted by something ineffable.
The Mirabell Gardens is a baroque garden in Salzburg that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Historic Center of the City of Salzburg. The design of the Mirabell Gardens in its current form was commissioned by Prince Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun under the direction of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. In 1854 the Mirabell Gardens were opened to the public by Emperor Franz Joseph.
Mirabell Palace was built in 1606 by prince-archbishop Wolf Dietrich for his beloved Salome Alt. The „Baroque Marble Staircase“ leads up to the Marble Hall of Mirabell Palace. The famous four-flight staircase (1722) is based on the design by Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt. It was built in 1726 by Georg Raphael Donner, the most important Central European sculptor of his time. Instead of a balustrade, it is secured with imaginative parapets made of C-arcs and volutes with putti decorations.
Tall, with reddish brown hair and gray eyes, Salome Alt, the most beautiful woman in town. Wolf Dietrich got to know her during a festivity in the city drink room on Waagplatz. There the official boards of the city council were held and academic acts came to an end. After his election as Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich he tried to obtain a dispensation through which it would have been possible for him as a cleric to be married. Despite the mediation attempts by his uncle, Cardinal Marcus Sitticus von Hohenems, this project failed. In 1606 he had Altenau Castle, now called Mirabell, built for Salome Alt, modeled on the Roman „Ville suburbane“.
Bellerophon, the greatest hero and slayer of monsters, rides the captured flying horse. His greatest feat was killing the monster Chimera, a goat’s body with a lions´s head and a serpent’s tail. Bellerophon earned the disfavour of the gods after attempting to ride Pegasus to Mount Olympus to join them.
Pegasus fountain that Maria and the children leap off of in the Sound of Music while singing the Do Re Mi. Pegasus, the mythical divine horse is an offspring of the Olympian god Poseidon, god of the horses. Everywhere the winged horse struck his hoof to the earth, an inspiring water spring burst forth.
Two stone lions lying on the bastion wall, one in front, the other slightly raised looking towards the sky, guard the entrance from the small ground floor to the bastion garden. There were three lions on the coat of arms of the Babenbergs. On the right of the Salzburg state coat of arms is an upright black lion turned to the right in gold and on the left, as on the Babenberg coat of arms, shows a silver bar in red, the Austrian shield.
The dwarf garden, with sculptures made of Mount Untersberg marble, is part of the baroque Mirabell garden designed by Fischer von Erlach. In the baroque period, overgrown and short people were employed at many European courts. They were valued for their loyalty and faithfulness. The dwarves should keep all evil away.
The typical baroque bosquet was a little artfully cut “wood” in the baroque Mirabell garden of Fischer von Erlach. The trees and hedges were traversed by a straight axis with hall-like widenings. The bosket thus formed a counterpart to the castle building with its corridors, stairs and halls and was also used in a similar way to the interior of the castle for performances of chamber concerts and other small amusements. Today the western bosket of Mirabell Castle consists of a three-row „avenue“ of winter linden trees, which are kept in a geometrically cube-shaped shape by regular cuts, and an arcade with a round arch trellis, the hedge tunnel Maria and the children run down while singing Do Re Mi.
Red tulips in a baroque flower bed design in the large garden parterre of the Mirabell Gardens, the length of which is aimed south in the direction of the Hohensalzburg fortress above the old town to the left of the Salzach. After the secularization of the Archdiocese of Salzburg in 1811, the garden was reinterpreted in the current English landscape garden style by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, with part of the baroque areas being preserved.
In 1893, the garden area was reduced due to the construction of the Salzburg Theater, which is the large building complex adjacent to the southwest. The Salzburg State Theater on Makartplatz was built by the Viennese firm Fellner & Helmer, which specialized in the construction of theaters, as the New City Theater after the old theater, which Prince Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo had built in 1775 instead of a ballroom, had to be demolished due to security deficiencies.
The sculptures of the „Borghesi fencers“ at the Makartplatz entrance are exactly matching replicas based on an ancient sculpture from the 17th century that was found near Rome and that is in the Louvre now. The ancient life-size statue of a warrior fighting a rider is called a Borghesian fencer. The Borghesian fencer is distinguished by its excellent anatomical development and was therefore one of the most admired sculptures in the art of Renaissance.
In 1694 Prince Archbishop Johann Ernst Graf Thun and Hohenstein decided to build a new priests‘ house‘ for the two colleges founded by him together with a church dedicated to the Holy Trinity, Dreifaltigkeitskirche, on the eastern limits of the then Hannibal garden, the sloping site between the medieval gateway and a Mannerist Secundogenitur palace. Today, the Makart square, the former Hannibal garden, is dominated by the façade of the Holy Trinity Church which Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach erected in the middle of the college buildings, the new priests‘ house‘.
In the “Tanzmeisterhaus”, house no. 8 on Hannibalplatz, a rising, small, rectangular square aligned along the longitudinal axis to the Trinity Church, which was renamed Makartplatz during the lifetime of the artist who was appointed to Vienna by Emperor Franz Joseph I. the court dance master held dance lessons for aristocrats, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his parents lived in an apartment on the first floor from 1773 until he moved to Vienna in 1781, now a museum after the apartment in Getreidegasse where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born had become small.
Between the towers protruding, the facade of the Holy Trinity Church swings in concave in the middle with a rounded arched window with tendrils, between the double pilasters and the presented, coupled double columns, built by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach from 1694 to 1702. Towers on both sides with bells and clock gables. On the attic, the coat of arms of the founder with crook and sword, as a traditional iconographic attribute of Prince Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun and Hohenstein, who exercised both his spiritual and secular power. The concave central bay invites the spectator to move closer and enter the church.
The tambour, the connecting, cylindrical, open-window link between the church and the dome, is divided into eight units with small rectangular windows by means of delicate double pilasters. The dome fresco was made by Johann Michael Rottmayr around 1700 and shows the coronation of Maria with the assistance of holy angels, prophets and patriarchs.
In the ceiling there is a second much smaller tambour also structured with rectangular windows. Johann Michael Rottmayr was the most respected and busiest painter of the early Baroque in Austria. He was highly valued by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, according to whose designs the Trinity Church was built by Prince Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun and Hohenstein from 1694 to 1702.
The oval main room is dominated by the light that shines through a semicircular window located above the main altar, that is divided into small rectangles, whereby the small rectangles are in turn divided into so-called slug panes in a honeycomb offset. The high altar originally comes from a design by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. The altar’s reredos is an aedicula, a marble structure with pilasters and a flat segmented arch gable. The Holy Trinity and two adoring angels are shown as a plastic group.
The pulpit with the preacher’s cross is inserted into the wall niche on the right. The pews are on the four diagonal walls on a marble floor, which has a pattern that emphasizes the oval of the room. In the crypt is a sarcophagus with the heart of the builder Prince Archbishop Johann Ernst Count Thun and Hohenstein based on a design by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach.
Linzer Gasse, the elongated main road of the old town of Salzburg on the right bank of the Salzach, leads rising from the Platzl to the Schallmoserstraße in the direction of Vienna. Shortly after the beginning of the Linzer Gasse at the height of the Stefan-Zweig-Platz the Francis Gate is located on the right, south, side of the Linzer Gasse. Francis Gate is a high 2-storey passage, the rustic-matched gateway to Stefan-Zweig-Weg to the Francis Port and on to the Capuchin Monastery at Capuzinerberg. In the crest of the archway is the sculpted army cartridge with coat of arms of Count Markus Sittikus of Hohenems, from 1612 to 1619 princebishop of the archfoundation Salzburg, the builder of the Francis Gate. Above the army cartridge is a relief on which the stigmatization of the HL. Francis in framing with blown gable is shown, from 1617.
The focus of the photo taken in Linzer Gasse is on wrought iron brackets, also known as nose shields. Artisanal nose shields have been made from iron by blacksmiths since the Middle Ages. The advertised craft is drawn attention to with symbols such as a key. Guilds are corporations of craftsmen that were created in the Middle Ages to protect common interests.
In Linzer Gasse no. 41 there is the Sebastians Church that is with its south-eastern long side and its façade tower in line with Linzer Gasse. The first St. Sebastian’s Church dates from 1505-1512. It was rebuilt from 1749-1753. The high altar in the retracted round apse has a slightly concave marble structure with bundles of pilasters, a pair of pillars presented, straight cranked entablature and volute top. In the center a statue with Mary with the child from around 1610. In the excerpt there is a relief of Saint Sebastian from 1964.
The access to the Sebastian cemetery from Linzer Straße is between the choir of the Sebastian Church and the Altstadthotel Amadeus. A semicircular arch portal, which is bordered by pilasters, entablature and top from 1600 with a blown gable, which contains the coat of arms of the founder and builder, Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich.
The Sebastian cemetery connects to the north-west of the Sebastian Church. It was built from 1595-1600 on behalf of Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich in place of a cemetery that had existed since the beginning of the 16th century, modeled on the Italian Campi Santi. Camposanto, Italian for „holy field“, is the Italian name for a courtyard-like enclosed cemetery with an archway open inwards. The Sebastian cemetery is surrounded on all sides by pillar arcades. The arcades are vaulted with groin vaults between arched belts.
In the field of the Sebastian cemetery next to the path to the mausoleum, the Mozart enthusiast Johann Evangelist Engl had a display grave built containing the grave of the Nissen family. Georg Nikolaus Nissen had a second marriage to Constanze, widowed Mozart. Mozart’s father Leopold however was buried in the so-called communal grave with the number 83, today the Eggersche grave on the south side of the cemetery. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is laid to rest in St. Marx in Vienna, his mother in Saint-Eustache in Paris and sister Nannerl in St. Peter in Salzburg.
At the corner of the building on the corner of Dreifaltigkeitsgasse / Linzer Gasse, the so-called “Münchner Hof”, a sculpture is attached to the protruding edge on the first floor, depicting a stylized monk with raised arms, the left hand holding a book. The official coat of arms of Munich is a monk holding an oath book in his left hand, and taking an oath on the right. The coat of arms of Munich is known as the Münchner Kindl. The Münchner Hof stands where the oldest brewery inn in Salzburg, the „Goldenes Kreuz-Wirtshaus“, stood.
The Salzach flows north into the Inn. It owes its name to the salt shipping that operated on the river. Salt from Hallein Dürrnberg was the most important source of income for the Salzburg archbishops. The Salzach and Inn run on the border with Bavaria where there were also salt deposits in Berchtesgaden. Both circumstances together formed the basis for conflicts between the Archbishopric of Salzburg and Bavaria, which reached their climax in 1611 with the occupation of of Berchtesgaden by Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich. As a result, Maximilian I, the Duke of Bavaria, occupied Salzburg and forced Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich to abdicate.
Through the arch of the town hall you step onto the town hall square. At the end of the town hall square the tower of the town hall stands in the side axis of the rococo facade of the building. The tower of the old town hall is set off by giant pilasters above the cornice with corner pilasters . On the tower is a small hexagonal bell tower with a multi-part dome. The bell tower contains two smaller bells from the 14th and 16th centuries and a large bell from the 20th century. In the Middle Ages, the residents were dependent on the bell, as the tower clock was only added in the 18th century. The bell gave the residents a sense of time and was rung in the event of a fire.
The Alte Markt is a rectangular square that is touched on the narrow northern side by the Kranzlmarkt-Judengasse street and which widens in a rectangular shape in the south and opens up towards the residence. The square is framed by a closed row of stately, 5- to 6-storey town houses, most of which are medieval or from the 16th century. The houses are partly 3- to 4-, partly 6- to 8-axis and mostly have rectangular parapet windows and profiled eaves.
The predominance of slender plastered facades with straight window canopies, slab style decor or delicate decor from the 19th century is decisive for the character of the space. The Josephine slab style made use of the simple buildings in the suburbs, which had dissolved the tectonic order into layers of walls and slabs. In the middle of the intimate square on the Alter Markt stands the former market fountain, consecrated to St. Florian, with a Floriani column in the middle of the fountain.
The octagonal well basin made of Untersberg marble was built in 1488 in place of an old draw well after a drinking water pipe had been built from the Gersberg over the city bridge to the old market. The ornate, painted spiral grille on the fountain dates from 1583, the tendrils of which end in grotesques made of sheet metal, ibexes, birds, riders and heads.
The Alte Markt is a rectangular square that is touched on the narrow northern side by the Kranzlmarkt-Judengasse street and which widens in a rectangular shape in the south and opens up towards the residence.
The square is framed by a closed row of stately, 5- to 6-storey town houses, most of which are medieval or from the 16th century. The houses are partly 3- to 4-, partly 6- to 8-axis and mostly have rectangular parapet windows and profiled eaves.
The predominance of slender plastered facades with straight window canopies, slab style decor or delicate decor from the 19th century is decisive for the character of the space. The Josephine slab style made use of the simple buildings in the suburbs, which had dissolved the tectonic order into layers of walls and slabs. The walls of the houses were decorated with pilaster strips instead of large pilasters.
In the middle of the intimate square on the Alter Markt stands the former market fountain, consecrated to St. Florian, with a Floriani column in the middle of the fountain. The octagonal well basin made of Untersberg marble was built in 1488 in place of an old draw well after a drinking water pipe had been built from the Gersberg over the city bridge to the old market. The Gersberg is located in a southwest basin between the Gaisberg and the Kühberg, which is a northwestern foothill of the Gaisberg. The ornate, painted spiral grille on the fountain dates from 1583, the tendrils of which end in grotesques made of sheet metal, ibexes, birds, riders and heads.
At the level of the Florianibrunnen, on the east side of the square, in house no. 6, is the old prince-archbishop’s court pharmacy founded in 1591 in a house with late baroque window frames and roofs with apex volutes from the middle of the 18th century.
The old prince-archbishop’s court pharmacy on the ground floor has a 3-axis shop front from around 1903. The preserved pharmacy, the work rooms of the pharmacy, with shelves, prescription table as well as vessels and devices from the 18th century are Rococo. The pharmacy was originally located in the neighboring house no.7 and was only transferred to its current location,house no. 6, in 1903.
Café Tomaselli at Alter Markt No. 9 in Salzburg was founded in 1700. It is the oldest café in Austria. Johann Fontaine, who came from France, was given permission to serve chocolate, tea and coffee in the nearby Goldgasse. After Fontaine’s death, the coffee vault changed hands several times. In 1753, the Engelhardsche coffee house was taken over by Anton Staiger, the court master of Archbishop Siegmund III. Count Schrattenbach. In 1764 Anton Staiger bought the „Abraham Zillnerische dwelling on the corner of the old market“, a house that has a 3-axis facade facing the Alter Markt and a 4-axis facade facing Churfürststrasse and was provided with a sloping ground floor wall and window frames around 1800. Staiger turned the coffee house into an elegant establishment for the upper class. Members of the Mozart and Haydn families also frequented Café Tomaselli. Carl Tomaselli bought the café in 1852 and opened the Tomaselli kiosk opposite the café in 1859. The porch was added in 1937/38 by Otto Prossinger. After the Second World War, the American operated the café under the name Forty Second Street Café.
Ludwig Michael von Schwanthaler, the last offspring of the Upper Austrian sculptor family Schwanthaler, created the Mozart monument in 1841 on the occasion of the 50th year of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s death. The almost three-meter-high bronze sculpture, cast by Johann Baptist Stiglmaier, director of the royal ore foundry in Munich, was erected on September 4, 1842 in Salzburg in the middle of what was then Michaeler-Platz.
The classical bronze figure shows a Mozart in a contrapostal position contemporary skirt and coat, stylus, sheet of music (scroll) and laurel wreath. Allegories executed as bronze reliefs symbolize Mozart’s work in the fields of church, concert and chamber music as well as opera. Today’s Mozartplatz was created in 1588 by demolishing various town houses under Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau. The house Mozartplatz 1 is the so called New Residence, in which the Salzburg Museum is housed. The Mozart statue is one of the most famous postcard subjects in Salzburg’s old town.
Behind the residence, the drum dome of the Salzburg Collegiate Church, which was built in the area of Paris Lodron University from 1696 to 1707 by Prince Archbishop Johann Ernst Graf von Thun and Hohenstein based on designs by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach under the supervision of the court aster mason Johann Grabner is divided octagonally by double bars.
Next to the drum dome are the balustraded towers of the Collegiate Church, at the corners of which you can see statues. A lantern, a round openwork structure, is placed on the drum dome above the dome eye. In Baroque churches, a lantern almost always forms the end of a dome and represents an important source of subdued daylight.
The Residenzplatz was created by Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau by removing a row of town houses on Aschhof around 1590, a smaller square corresponding to today’s Hypo main building on Residenzplatz, which covered around 1,500 m², and the cathedral cemetery, which was north of the cathedral located. As a replacement for the cathedral cemetery, the Sebastian cemetery was created next to St. Sebastian’s church in the right bank of the old town.
Along the Aschhof and towards the town houses, a solid wall ran around the cathedral cemetery at that time, the castle wall, which represented the border between the princely town and the township. Wolf Dietrich also moved this wall back towards the cathedral in 1593. This is how the square in front of the old and new residence, which was then called the main square, was created.
The so-called Wallistrakt, which today houses part of the Paris-Lodron University, was founded in 1622 by Prince Archbishop Paris Count von Lodron. The building was named Wallistrakt from the resident Maria Franziska Countess Wallis.
The oldest part of the Wallis tract is the so-called courtyard arch building with a three-storey facade that forms the western wall of the cathedral square. The storeys are divided by flat double, plastered horizontal strips on which the windows sit. The flat facade is emphasized vertically by the rusticated corner pilasters and the window axes.
The grand floor of the court arch building was on the 2nd floor. In the north, it borders on the south wing of the residence, in the south, on the Archabbey of St. Peter. In the south part of the court arch building there is the Museum St. Peter, part of the DomQuartier Museum. Wolf Dietrich’s prince-archbishop’s apartments were located in this southern area of the court arch building.
The arcades are a 3-axis, 2-storey pillar hall that was built in 1604 under Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau. The courtyard arches connect the Domplatz with the axis Franziskanergasse Hofstallgasse, which runs orthogonally to the facade of the cathedral and was completed in 1607.
Through the courtyard arches one entered the forecourt of the cathedral church from the west, as if through a triumphal arch. The „porta triumphalis“, which was originally intended to open with five arches to the cathedral square, played a role at the end of the prince-archbishop’s procession.
The Salzburg Cathedral is consecrated to the hll. Rupert and Virgil. The patronage is celebrated on September 24th, St. Rupert’s Day. The Salzburg Cathedral is a Baroque building that was inaugurated in 1628 by Prince Archbishop Paris Count von Lodron.
The crossing is in the eastern, front part of the cathedral. Above the crossing is the 71 meter high drum dome of the cathedral with corner pilasters and rectangular windows. In the dome there are eight frescoes with scenes from the Old Testament in two rows. The scenes relate to the scenes of the Passion of Christ in the nave. Between the rows of frescoes is a row with windows. Representations of the four evangelists can be found on the segment surfaces of the dome.
Above the sloping crossing pillars there are trapezoidal pendants to transition from the square floor plan of the crossing to the octagonal drum. The dome has the shape of a monastery vault, with a curved surface that becomes narrower towards the top above the octagonal base of the drum on each side of the polygon. In the central vertex there is an openwork structure above the dome eye, the lantern, in which the Holy Spirit is located as a dove. The crossing receives almost all of the light from the dome lantern.
In Salzburg Cathedral into the single-nave choir light shines, into which the free-standing high altar, a structure made of marble with pilasters and a curved, blown gable, is immersed. The top of the high altar with blown triangular gable is framed by steep volutes and caryatids. The altar panel shows the resurrection of Christ with the Hll. Rupert and Virgil in the excerpt. In the mensa, the table of the altar, there is a reliquary of St. Rupert and Virgil. Rupert founded St. Peter, Austria’s first monastery, Virgil was abbot of St. Peter and built the first cathedral in Salzburg.
The nave of the Salzburg Cathedral is four-bayed. The main nave is accompanied on both sides by a row of chapels and oratorios above. The walls are structured by double pilasters in huge order, with smooth shafts and composite capitals. Above the pilasters there is a circumferential, cranked entablature on which the barrel vault with double straps rests.
A cranking is the drawing of a horizontal cornice around a vertical wall protrusion, pulling a cornice over a protruding component. The term entablature is understood to mean the entirety of the horizontal structural elements above pillars.
In the compartments between the pilaster and the entablature there are high arched arcades, protruding balconies resting on volute consoles and two-part oratory doors. Oratorios, small separate prayer rooms, are located like a log on the gallery of the nave and have doors to the main room. An oratory is usually not open to the public, but is reserved for a specific group, for example clergy, members of the order, brotherhoods or distinguished believers.
The single-nave transverse arms and the choir each connect in a rectangular yoke to the square crossing in a semicircle. In the conche, the semicircular apse, of the choir, 2 of the 3 window floors are combined by the pilasters. The transition to the crossing of the main nave, transverse arms and choir is constricted by multiple layers of pilasters.
The trikonchos are flooded with light while the nave is in semi-darkness due to the only indirect lighting. In contrast to a floor plan as a Latin cross, in which a straight nave in the crossing area is crossed at right angles by a likewise straight transept, in the three-conch choir, trikonchos, three conches, i.e. semicircular apses of the same size, on the sides of a square are like this set to each other so that the floor plan has the shape of a clover leaf.
White stucco with predominantly ornamental motifs with black in the undercuts and depressions adorns the festoons, the ornamented view from below of the arches, the chapel passages and the wall zones between the pilasters. The stucco extends over the entablature with a tendril frieze and forms a sequence of geometric fields with closely joined frames in the vault between the chords. The floor of the cathedral consists of bright Untersberger and red colored Adnet marble.
The Hohensalzburg Fortress is located on the Festungsberg above the old town of Salzburg. It was built by Archbishop Gebhard, a beatified person of the Archdiocese of Salzburg, around 1077 as a Romanesque palace with a circular wall surrounding the hilltop. Archbishop Gebhard was active in the court chapel of Emperor Heinrich III, 1017 – 1056, Roman-German King, Emperor and Duke of Bavaria. In 1060 he came to Salzburg as archbishop. He mainly devoted himself to the establishment of the diocese Gurk (1072) and the Benedictine monastery Admont (1074).
From 1077 onwards he had to stay in Swabia and Saxony for 9 years, because after the deposition and banishment of Henry IV he had joined the opposing king Rudolf von Rheinfelden and could not assert himself against Heinrich IV. in his archbishopric. Around 1500 the living quarters under Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach, who ruled absolutist and nepotist, were sumptuously furnished and the fortress was expanded to its present appearance. The only unsuccessful siege of the fortress took place in the Peasants‘ War in 1525. Since the secularization of the archbishopric in 1803, the Hohensalzburg fortress has been in the hands of the state.
Already in the Middle Ages there was a „Rosstümpel“ on Kapitelplatz, at that time still in the middle of the square. Under Prince Archbishop Leopold Freiherr von Firmian, a nephew of Prince Archbishop Johann Ernst Graf von Thun and Hohenstein, the new cruciform complex with curved corners and a balustrade was built in 1732 according to a design by Franz Anton Danreiter, the chief inspector of the Salzburg court gardens.
Access for the horses to the water basin leads directly to the group of sculptures, which show the sea god Neptune with a trident and crown on a water-spouting sea horse with 2 water-spouting tritons on the sides, hybrid creatures, half of which consist of a human upper body and a fish-like lower body with a tail fin, in a Round arch niche in aedicule with double pilaster, straight entablature and a bent volute gable top crowned by ornamental vases. The baroque, moving sculpture was made by the Salzburg sculptor Josef Anton Pfaffinger, who also designed the Floriani fountain on the Alter Markt. Above the viewing bellows is a chronogram, an inscription in Latin, in which highlighted capital letters give a year number as numerals, with the sculpted coat of arms of Prince Archbishop Leopold Freiherr von Firmian in the gable field.
One of the first things you see when entering the main courtyard of the old residence from Residenzplatz is the grotto niche with a fountain and Hercules killing the dragon under the arcades of the western vestibule. Hercules depictions are monuments of Baroque commissioned art that were used as a political medium. Hercules is a hero famous for his strength, a figure from Greek mythology. The hero cult played an important role for the state, because the appeal to semi-divine figures represented a legitimation and guaranteed divine protection.
The depiction of the killing of the dragon by Hercules was based on a design by Prince Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, who had the new residence in the east of the cathedral rebuilt and the actual archbishop’s residence in the west of the cathedral largely rebuilt.
Hieronymus Graf von Colloredo, the last Salzburg prince archbishop before the secularization in 1803, had the walls of the state rooms of the residence decorated with fine ornamentation in white and gold by court plasterer Peter Pflauder in accordance with the classicist taste of the time.
The preserved early classicist tiled stoves date from the 1770s and 1780s. In 1803 the archbishopric was converted into a secular principality. With the transition to the imperial court, the residence was used by the Austrian imperial family as a secondary residence. The Habsburgs furnished the state rooms with furniture from the Hofimmobiliendepot.
The conference room is dominated by the electric light of 2 chandeliers, originally intended for use with candles, hanging from the ceiling. Chamdeliers are lighting elements, which are also called „Luster“ in Austria, and which with the use of several Light sources and glass to refract light produce a play of lights. Chandeliers are often used for representation purposes in highlighted halls.