Mariahilfer Straße

This guide to Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna starts with a wooden chapel built in 1660 to hold a copied miracle painting of Mary, and the tens of thousands of pilgrims who wore a dirt path to it every year on foot from Saint Stephen's Cathedral. It follows the 1683 siege of Vienna, when a sacristan named Erhard Lampel ran into a burning chapel to save the painting, and the procession that carried it back once the siege lifted, still marked every autumn. Listen for that autumn procession as you walk the boulevard's shopfronts.