For many Americans, Salzburg is first a movie. This autumn it gets a museum of its own: the Sound of Music Salzburg opens at Hellbrunn, beside the gazebo, run by the Salzburg Museum. Fans have come for sixty years. There is now a building for them.

But the film is a small part of Salzburg.

Mozart’s city

This is Mozart’s town, and he is hard to avoid. He was born in 1756 in the yellow house on Getreidegasse, the old town’s main shopping lane, where his family lived for twenty-six years. His face is on the chocolate, and his name is on the squares. Every summer the Salzburg Festival, the largest of its kind in the world, fills the town for six weeks. Spend a few days here and you will not get away from him.

Built on salt

The name means salt fortress. Salt from these mountains made the prince-archbishops who ruled Salzburg very rich, and their money built the city that stands now. The old town sits below the Hohensalzburg fortress, one of the largest surviving in Europe, with the Salzach river running through it and the Alps behind. There is a large baroque cathedral, a set of open squares, and domes and spires across the skyline. It is one of the most beautiful small cities in Europe, and it was beautiful long before the film.

The oldest restaurant in Europe

St. Peter’s, a working Benedictine monastery in the old town, has served meals since the year 803. That makes it Europe's oldest restaurant, and Mozart’s family ate there. Its Baroque Hall is one of the last concert halls in Salzburg that still allows real candlelight. Singers and musicians in period dress perform his music between the courses of a set dinner. It is built for tourists, and it is still worth visiting in the evening.

The lake country

Salzburg is also the way into the Salzkammergut, the lake district an hour east: deep lakes and steep green mountains, from the Mondsee to the Wolfgangsee. At the center is Hallstatt, a village of fewer than a thousand people below a cliff on its lake. Its salt mine is one of the oldest in the world, having been worked for thousands of years. Hallstatt is beautiful enough that a Chinese company spent nearly a billion dollars building a full-size replica of it in Guangdong. The original is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Stay more than a day or two, and Salzburg shifts from movie set to living city. That’s when most visitors realize they should have planned another night.