Getreidegasse Street

This guide to Getreidegasse in Salzburg starts with Josef Schatz, a wood turner who bought a shop in the eighteen hundreds and found a whale rib and a dried shark hanging from the ceiling. It traces the story back to a fifteenth-century rule that forced merchants crossing the Alps from Venice to display their goods here for three days, and to a trader who used the bones to advertise wonders from oceans his customers would never see. Along the way it follows how the display outlived its own explanation, and how the Salzburg Festival's Max Reinhardt later borrowed it as a stage prop. Look for the archway at number three as you pass beneath it.