Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of today’s best and most famous travel writers.  I enjoy his humor, anecdotal offbeat opinions and his overall view on the world.  In his book “Neither here Nor there” published by Black Swan Books he has a great chapter on traveling to Austria. The chapter is a must read before you go to Vienna.  Here is one paragraph from the book that I believe pretty well sums up what to expect when you go to Vienna:

Vienna is certainly the grandest city I have ever seen.  All along the Ringstrasse colossal buildings proclaim an imperial past – the parliament, the Palace of Justice, the Natural History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the opera house, the Burgtheater and above all the Hofburg, with its 2,600 rooms.  They all look much the same – mighty piles of granite and sandstone with warlike statuary crowded along the roofs and pediments.  A Martian coming to earth would unhesitatingly land at Vienna, thinking it the capital of the planet.

page updated: 2007.07.04