The week started with music in Udine in Italy and ended with music in the Esterhazy Schloss in Austria. The rest of the week has been by a series of lakes.
In Udine there was communal tango dancing in the Loggia with a lot of local participants who knew what they were doing.
The next day was our last in Italy as we drove up into the mountains to find a pass into Austria. It was a spectacular drive up and up until just 4 kilometres short of the border we found this road block of which there had been no previous warning!
So we wound our way down the mountain and back up again to another much more beautiful pass where we wild camped by our first lake of the week, Italy on one side and Austria on the other. If you look closely you can just see the Wildervan on the opposite shore.
It’s been a lazy week thanks to the heat and humidity which meant that the mountains have been veiled in haze and the air has been thick. So we drove up high and camped by two different lakes where we swam and walked in the early mornings. And we got time to draw. This is mine of the lake at the mountain pass
And these are drawings we did of each other.
And I did this of Arthur from a photo I took of him while we were in Corfu.
We walked up the valley from Pichl to this extraordinary lake aptly named Gruner See. I’ve never seen a lake which shone green like this. And there’s been no editing here!
Finally the weather broke with a dramatic thunder storm which lasted almost three hours right over us. So we’ve left the mountains and are next week now in Eisenstadt on the border between Austria and Hungary which is by another lake, the Neusiedler See. We’ve come here because I’ve just finished writing my family history which includes what happened to my Grandmother’s cousin. She survived Auschwitz and in 1956 had to escape when the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. Her daughter, my second cousin, was nine when they made their journey at night first by train (in cattle trucks) and then by boat across this large lake between Austria and Hungary. The boat (which was full of refugees) been sabotaged and nearly sank. They finally arrived in Eisenstadt where there was a refugee camp. We’re about to visit the Jewish museum here and I will report more as we’re also going to see the village my great grandparents came from.
So we came here just to see the town which had given them refuge and have been surprised to find that it’s where Haydn spent most of his life as the court musician to the Esterhazy family. This is the extraordinary church where is his mausoleum.
And by chance there was a concert in the concert hall where Haydn worked where Simon Rattle and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe were performing Dvorak, Mahler, Bartok and Schubert with the Czech mezzo soprano, Magdalena Kozena. They were fantastic! And we met Simon Rattle and the mezzo in the bar afterwards…
So, after three months in Italy and Greece, we’re now in Central Europe. And here’s Alex’s map to show where.
