More breakfast. Spaetzl and cheese for Sidney, poached egg and cheese sauce for me and Scott.

 

But we started with meats and cheese selection:

And ended with warm chocolate cake for Sidney and a crepe which I didn’t even order but ate because it was very good.

We then walked 2.6 km to the Belvedere galleries.  We started at the Upper Belvedere, a palace built by Prince Eugene Savoy, an Austrian military hero, who obviously had a lot of money because he also built a smaller palace called the Lower Belvedere.  The buildings now house art, mostly Austrian, and probably most famously Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and Judith, and another modern Austrian artist Egon Schiele, but also artists from elsewhere including Jacques Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps. The last confused us because we thought we’d seen the same painting in the Louvre in Paris, not Vienna. Thanks to the internet, we learned David painted 5 versions of the same subject. No photos allowed inside the buildings but we could photograph the grounds which were not on the scale of Versailles but still pretty impressive.

 

 

On our walk back, we detoured to look at Karlskirche, considered one of the great baroque churches in Vienna. I wanted to see it because it was on an art history exam I’d had. The columns quote Trajan’s column in Rome and the dome, St Peter’s.

We tried to go into the Opera House but they only allowed you inside with a guided tours or when going to a concert. The hotel concierge told us musical performances at this time of year are not good. Too bad.

Dinner back at Cantinetta Antinori. No starters this time.

veal and potatoes

 

Ragu on handmade pasta