Tulln

Tulln is one of Austria's oldest towns and one of its youngest at heart. Roman Comagena guarded the Danube here — the massive horseshoe tower by the river has stood since late antiquity — and the town earned a line in European legend: in the Nibelungenlied, it is at Tulln that Kriemhild first meets Etzel, king of the Huns, a scene the exuberant Nibelungen fountain on the riverbank replays in bronze. The Babenbergs held court here before Vienna eclipsed it; the Minorite church and the Romanesque charnel house remember the medieval town's rank.

Tulln's modern fame wears two faces. The first is painted: Egon Schiele was born in 1890 in the apartment above the railway station, the stationmaster's son who became the most unsparing draughtsman of the human figure; the town's Schiele Museum and birth rooms trace the beginnings of an art that scandalised and conquered Vienna. The second is planted: as Austria's self-declared garden city, Tulln hosts Die Garten Tulln, Europe's first ecological garden show — dozens of model gardens, a treetop walkway over the riverside forest — and an international garden fair that fills the town with flowers and horticulturists alike.

A Danube promenade made for slow evenings, and a concert life anchored by its music-gymnasium and churches, complete a town that has moved, in eight centuries, from Huns to hollyhocks — entirely for the better.