ASIANOVERLAND.NET LONDON TO SYDNEY DAY 271: SALZBURG TO VIENNA, AUSTRIA

Vienna is the "City of Music" due to its musical history, with many famous classical musicians including Beethoven and Mozart, living in Vienna. Vienna has been a leading European music centre since the age of Viennese Classicism and has probably changed the least of any city I have visited since my first visit to Vienna in 1970.

Vienna's ancestral roots lie in early Celtic and Roman settlements that transformed into a Medieval and Baroque city.

In 976, Leopold I of Babenberg became count of the Eastern March, a district around the Danube on the eastern frontier of Bavaria, which grew into the duchy of Austria. Each succeeding Babenberg ruler expanded the march east along the Danube, eventually encompassing Vienna and the lands immediately east. In 1145, Duke Henry II Jasomirgott moved the Babenberg family residence from Klosterneuburg in Lower Austria to Vienna. From that time, Vienna remained the center of the Babenberg dynasty.

In 1440, Vienna became the resident city of the Habsburg dynasty and grew to become the de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) in 1437, as well as a cultural centre for arts, science, music and fine cuisine. Hungary occupied Vienna between 1485 and 1490.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Christian forces twice stopped Ottoman armies outside Vienna, in the 1529 siege of Vienna and the 1683 Battle of Vienna. 

The Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815 was a series of international diplomatic meetings to discuss and agree upon a possible new layout of the European political and constitutional order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. 

At the negotiation table, the position of France was weak in the hands of the victors, Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia, due to the military strategy of its dictatorial leader over the previous two decades and his recent defeats. In the settlement, France gave up all its recent conquests, while the other three main powers made major territorial gains. Prussia added territory from smaller states: Swedish Pomerania, most of the Kingdom of Saxony, and the western part of the former Duchy of Warsaw . Austria gained parts of of northern Italy. Russia added the central and eastern part of the Duchy of Warsaw and Polish Ukraine. All agreed to ratifying the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, which had been created months before, from formerly Austrian territory.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna was the largest German-speaking city in the world, and before the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the city had two million inhabitants. Today, Vienna is the second-largest German-speaking city after Berlin

Vienna is also the "City of Dreams” as it was home to the world's first psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.

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