Felsenreitschule

This guide to the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg opens with the three stacked rows of arches above you, not a wall someone built but a hole someone emptied out, cut from the Monchsberg cliff in the early 1600s to supply stone for the city's cathedral. It follows Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun, who in 1693 looked at the exhausted quarry pit and hired the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach not to build a theatre but to carve one, chiseling ninety-six arched openings straight into the rock for horse shows and staged animal hunts. Stand back and look up at the arches as punched-out windows in solid mountain rather than a built facade.