Vienna, what can I say?  It’s so stuffed with ostentation, it’s too much to take in.  To be important back when was to have the biggest edifice closest to the royals.  So the approach to the Imperial Palace is lined for kilometers with elbow-to-elbow palaces.  Inside the Imperial Palace, the Imperial Treasury flaunts priceless crowns, relics, robes–every sort of royal paraphernalia.  I had to keep reminding myself that these were not reproductions.  Kings wore them.  Kings who ruled empires that changed the course of civilization. At the palace entrance I wondered about several sculptures of violent scenes.  They depicted the tasks of Hercules.  Really?  Those statues were […]