Not that the city itself isn't quietly and exquisitely special. It is small enough to retain its rennaissance and baroque charm, beautiful with fancifully pretty churches and tiny, windy streets and surrounded by Alps.

But after two days there, I never wanted to hear about Mozart or the film "The Sound of Music" ever again.

The town is positively plastered with signs for "Sound of Music tours" and dozens of plaques denoting the many, many different places Mozart lived, played an organ, or got smashed. Just a few hours into my visit, these began to blur and run together, so that I found myself making journal entries like this:

Ah, Salzburg! Home to that famous musical family, the Amadeus Von Trapps. The genius of the clan, young Wolfgang Amadeus "Mozart" Von Trapp, wrote his first symphony at age five.

In case you didn't notice, no one actually plays that symphony anymore, which strongly implies to me that it sucked dingos' kidneys. But hey, at least he composed one. At age five, I still had training wheels on my bike and my favorite pastimes were plastering my dog with little yellow stickers and eating my crayons. But back to the young prodigy Wolfgang, who found a Magic Flute when he was eight, which he used to rid the town of rats. To celebrate this victory, he went running through the hills singing about how they (the hills, not the rats) were coming alive and singing back to him. Folks said he was a little off, young Wolfgang was.

Unfortunately he did not, as is commonly believed, then proceed to rid the town of children. No one knows quite why not, especially as his own dozen or so siblings were the whiniest bunch of spoiled brats ever to warble their way to a major motion picture contract. But hey, do you think they were going to tell such a lucrative tourist-attracting genius like Mozart what to do?

At age thirteen, in a ceremony performed by the town priest, Don "Figaro" Giovanni, Amadeus married his nanny, who up until then had been a nun, and not just a bit crackers herself (she spoke German with a British accent and believed she could fly with the aid of her umbrella).

Then he went on to write a whole bunch of symphonies and piano concertos and stuff.

He got the nickname "Mozart" after a famous brand of chocolates he was partial to. They were very expensive chocolates (printed, as they were, with a picture of George Washington) and he ate so many of them that he developed a maniacal laugh, and also went broke and had to sell all his powdered wigs.

Destitute and persued by Nazis named "Rolf" who forced his family to sing for SS troops, Mozart made what was probably the most boneheaded move of his life. He decided to escape the Nazis in Austria by hiking through the Alps.

And where did he go to escape, you might ask? Switzerland perhaps? Maybe Italy? As a last resort possibly Cleveland?

No, of course not. Young Wolfgang, toting his entire moronic family along behind, hiked straight across the Austrian border into Germany, singing the whole way!

more >>