Vöcklabruck

Vöcklabruck announces itself with two towers and an emperor's signature. The town — "bridge over the Vöckla", founded where the salt road crossed the river — is entered, as in the Middle Ages, through two frescoed gate-towers that seal either end of its long market square; on their walls, rediscovered under plaster in the twentieth century, ride the heralds of Emperor Maximilian I, painted by his court master Jörg Kölderer: double eagles, armoured knights and the coats of arms of the Habsburg lands, imperial propaganda of around 1500 preserved nowhere else so vividly. Between the towers, tall Baroque façades conceal far older houses — one hides a perfect Italian arcaded courtyard — along what is less a square than a graceful widening of the old imperial road.

The town has always been a gateway: behind it rise the first hills of the Salzkammergut, and the Attersee — the lake where Gustav Mahler and Gustav Klimt spent their most productive summers — lies twenty minutes south, making Vöcklabruck the workaday elder brother of Austria's most painted landscape. The pilgrimage church of Maria Schöndorf on its hill and the Baroque Dörflkirche of St Ägidius frame the townscape.

Cultural life runs on the intimate scale the setting suggests: chamber concerts, church music, school ensembles and festivals in the square between the emperor's towers — where every performance enjoys a five-hundred-year-old audience painted on the walls.