Ring Around Vienna

March 21, 2005 — -- Many great European cities keep the crowds coming because of their ancient intact monuments. But in Vienna, one of the city's best sights is a road that resulted from a remodeling job.

In the 1860s, Emperor Franz Josef had Vienna's medieval wall torn down and replaced with a grand boulevard -- the Ringstrasse. The road, 190 feet wide and nearly three miles long, circles the city's core and gives Vienna a stately air. A trip around the ring road by tram is a wunderbar way to spend an afternoon, seeing statues, museums, parks and a canal, while getting a good taste of Viennese life.

On the Ringstrasse is the huge City Park, honoring many great Viennese musicians and composers with statues. Look for the gilded statue of Waltz King and native son Johann Strauss holding a violin as he did when he conducted his orchestra. Strauss, composer of "The Blue Danube," would whip his fans into a three-quarter-time frenzy.

Just north of the park, part of the real-life Danube awaits -- the Danube Canal, an offshoot of the mightier modern-day Danube. The Danube Canal area was the site of the original Roman town, Vindobona. Nearby are the ivy-covered walls and round Romanesque arches of St. Ruprecht's, the oldest church in Vienna, built in the 11th century on a chunk of Roman ruins.

Still on the Ringstrasse, you can see what looks like a huge red-brick castle, actually a high-profile barracks. It was built at the command of a nervous Franz Josef, who found himself on the throne as an 18-year-old in 1848 -- the same year that people's revolts against autocracy were sweeping across Europe. Franz Josef's paranoia was justified, judging by the next sight on the Ringstrasse. The huge, frilly, neo-Gothic church just down the street is a "votive church," built as thanks to God when an 1853 assassination attempt on the emperor failed.