Austria to Italy to France

We decided to head over to the Hofburg Palace to see a few other historical sites. We walked past the Opera House and a few other buildings that were picture worthy.

 Then we went into the Imperial Treasury Museum. Some things stood out that were just amazing artifacts worth remembering.

 First the Crown of Rudolph II. It was made of more jewels then I would know what to do with in 1602.

 

 His Royal cloak was very impressive to look at. It must have been very heavy to wear and I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to wear that in the summer.

There were a large number of religious artifacts. I think it’s quite interesting that they are kept in a museum in Vienna. I’m not sure how these items were validated but there is a strong belief in their healing powers by the Viennese population.   I’m not sure Cat grasped the concept of what they were.

Below are pictures of a few of them:

The nail that pierced Jesus’ hand when he was crucified.

Wood from the cross he was crucified on and the spearhead that stabbed his side, which has the metal from one of the other nails wrapped around it.

Material from Jesus’ loincloth and from the tablecloth at the last supper.

 

As well as wood from his manger.

 

Lastly, the Order of the Golden Fleece had some amazing pieces that is worth talking about here. To get the locals to support him the King made them Knights of the Golden Fleece. They had to swear total loyalty and he wore their family badge on his collar necklace. He gave each of them a necklace with flint and the Golden Fleece as well as their own chapel.

These drapes took over 10 years to sew. Such care and effort was taken to meticulously characterize each facial expression, each ripple of clothing, each shadow with thread. They used colored silk over golden thread to produce shading.  They would space the colored silk/thread out more to let the gold shine thru.  Pictures just don’t give these justice.

We left the museum and walked past the Spanish Hofreitschule which is the Spanish Riding School stables. Although we didn’t get to see the horses perform, they were beautiful to look at. During the war, they would actually go to great lengths to train the horses to protect their riders. They removed the heavy armour from the horses that were worn during that period and instead taught them different maneuvers.  By standing on their hind legs they were able make space, kick backwards or to the side to injure the enemy. Also, the horses are born black and turn bright white as they get older.

From there we went to the Demel to try Vienna’s famous cakes. The Sacher Torte was the dark chocolate cake with apricot jam and is the traditional cake for Austria (similar to Apple pie for Americans). This is what they have for birthdays and special occasions. The lighter chocolate cake is  Demel’s famous cake called the Anna Torte which was a chocolate and nougat calorie bomb!  Both were scrumptious. You could also watch the pastry chefs as they fine tuned their edible cake decorations.

We had about 3 hours to kill before we caught our night train and decided to peak inside this church. Imagine our surprise when we walked in. As luck would have it, we were told there was an organ and choir performance starting in a few minutes. Combining the music with the baroque decor was an sensory sensation difficult to explain.

On our way back to the train station, we stopped at a few stores. First we went to a kids clothing store. Cat really wanted this dress but at $169 we just couldn’t justify it. Instead we bought 2 bouncy balls!

We also stopped in the Swarovski store. (Fyi it is an Austrian company). H bought Cat and I some bling to remember our trip! The thought around this ring is that it will be a trial to see if I want wear the real thing sometime in the future!

We got to the train station to catch our night train. The train was 14 hours from Vienna to Milan, Italy

We were in a sleeper cabin for 4. We ended up sharing our cabin with a lovely lady from Verona, Italy. She has such an interesting background and actually had restored the needlework on garments similar to the one I mentioned above.  She is currently getting her Masters in Art history and was someone I could talk to for hours.  We were all pretty tired and went to sleep around 10 and slept all the way thru until 6. It’s a very small world as her daughter is going to boarding school just a few miles from where H went to school! She got off in Verona and we had the cabin to ourselves until we got to Milan.

We had 2 hours in Milan to purchase our connecting train tickets to get to Nice.  After a bit of a runaround, we got things organized, grabbed some train station Italian pizza (yuk)  for breakfast and sandwiches for later and barely made it in time. When we got on our second train we found out we had 3 separate seats in various parts of the car. After a few moments of disorganization we figured it out and now we are on our way to Nice!

View from the train.