Hellbrunn Palace: A Joker Gone Wild

April 26, 2010

I am sitting.  Outside.  On a bench.  At a palace.  The children are playing on a huge playground that they have all to themselves on the grounds of the palace, which is just outside of Salzburg.  It was raining earlier, but now the sun is out and the air smells fresh and clean.  A hundred meters or so away from my bench, across the lush green grass and hundreds of gorgeous tulips, is the white pavilion used in the filming of The Sound of Music movie in 1964.  You remember:  the “Sixteen going on Seventeen” number.  I love that scene.

We already toured the gardens and the palace, and are now just enjoying our surroundings and a really great zip line.  Yes, even I took a few turns.  

It is difficult not to feel lighthearted in a place such as this; perhaps the grounds are infused with the spirit of the original owner, who was a man with a playful sense of humor.  As expected, the kids were thrilled with the tour of the Hellbrunn gardens, which are full of trick water fountains and water-powered mechanisms.  The Archbishop Markus Sittikus was a bit of a prankster, who built the palace about 400 years ago as a summer “day” palace for entertaining.  No one ever spent the night there, apparently.  His guests would come and take a stroll through the gardens or sit at the outdoor dining table… and he would surprise them with some unexpected showers from unexpected places.  (In the case of the outdoor table, the water would come shooting up from their seats and make them all wet in embarrassing places  His was the only seat (at the head of the table) that stayed dry).  I couldn’t help picturing his female guests, wearing their best silk gowns or having newly coiffed hair, getting a bit miffed by the sudden soakings.  Perhaps word got out, and if people were going to dinner at Schloss Hellbrunn they knew to wear their less fancy duds.   Our engaging Austrian tour guide assured me that the water was used, in part, to keep the drunken guests in line.  I was slightly appeased. 

There is a mini palace on a hill that overlooks the vast gardens.  It is sometimes called the “Month Palace.”  According to our palace audiotour, there is documentation to support the story that a guest came to visit the Archbishop and suggested that such a structure on the hill might be a nice visual complement to the grounds.  A month later, as the man was traveling back through the area on his return trip, he was surprised to see a completed palace standing in the exact spot where he had suggested one be built.   Like magic.  Apparently being an Archbishop (and having family money?) had its perks.  Sadly, he didn’t live to enjoy his summer palace for long; he died two years after it was completed.

Eventually, we had to leave.  We stopped at an Aldi grocery store on the way out of town and picked up a few things to take back to our hotel.  After we unloaded the groceries into the back of the car, Reyna offered to return the cart.  She strolled confidently, pushed the cart into place, inserted the “key” from the chain on the next cart into our cart handle to eject the 1 Euro coin deposit and marched triumphantly back.  She acted like it was no big deal   -- as if we were at home, instead of in a foreign country.  I was proud and a little bit amazed.  My kids no longer balk at getting in a store checkout line themselves and paying for an item or two without my assistance.  They say Danke ("Thanks"), Entschuldigung ("Excuse me") and Es tut mir leid ("I'm sorry") to strangers.  They seem so confident and self-assured.  That makes me happy.