Mirabell Palace

Where it sits. Mirabell Palace stands on the right bank of the Salzach in Salzburg, on the flat ground of the newer part of the city rather than in the cramped old town across the river. That position is the whole point of its garden: the axis of the parterre is aimed south-west, straight at the Hohensalzburg fortress on its cliff, so the fountains, the clipped hedges and the flowerbeds are laid out as a foreground to a castle nearly a kilometre away. The palace itself is a restrained yellow-and-white block that today houses Salzburg's city administration, including the mayor's office, which means much of it is a working town hall rather than a museum.

The story behind it. Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau had the house built in 1606 for Salome Alt, the merchant's daughter with whom he had fifteen children despite his clerical office, and called it Altenau. His successor Markus Sittikus, who deposed and imprisoned him, renamed it Mirabell. The building took its baroque shape between 1721 and 1727 under Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, the architect of the Belvedere in Vienna, working for Archbishop Franz Anton von Harrach. A fire swept the city in 1818 and gutted much of the palace; the reconstruction by Peter de Nobile stripped the exterior back to a plainer neoclassical face. Two great interiors came through. The Angel Staircase, carved by Georg Raphael Donner in the 1720s with plump putti tumbling along the balustrade, and the Marble Hall, where the child Mozart played for the archbishop and where the city still holds concerts and civil weddings.

The gardens. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach redesigned the grounds in 1690, and the layout survives: a sunken parterre with a central fountain, four large marble sculpture groups by Ottavio Mosto showing Aeneas, Hercules, Paris and Pluto set at the corners, and a rose garden on the terrace at the far end. The Pegasus fountain, cast by Kaspar Gras in 1661, was moved to its present spot beside the parterre in 1913. Two survivals are unusual. The hedge theatre, cut between 1704 and 1718, is one of the oldest surviving open-air garden theatres north of the Alps, and the Dwarf Garden of 1715 holds a set of marble dwarfs, grotesque portraits of real figures from the archbishop's court, which is the earliest garden of its kind in Europe. Emperor Franz Joseph opened the whole park to the public in 1854.

On screen. The Mirabell gardens carry the climax of the Do-Re-Mi sequence in Robert Wise's The Sound of Music (1965), the montage in which Maria teaches the seven children to sing. The scenes shot here run in a recognisable circuit through the garden:

• The children skipping around the Pegasus fountain with the parterre behind them
• The vine-covered pergola tunnel on the northern side, run through in a line
• The dwarfs of the Zwergerlgarten, whose heads are patted as the group passes
• The flight of steps at the western end of the garden, where the cast lines up in ascending order for the final chord with the fortress in the background

Those steps are now known to Salzburg guides simply as the Do-Re-Mi stairs, and the shot is reproduced dozens of times an hour in summer. Nothing of the film's interiors was shot in the palace; the Marble Hall is often assumed to be the ballroom, but the von Trapp ballroom was a set built in Los Angeles.

What you actually see today. Entry to the garden is free and it stays open from dawn until dusk, so a walk through it before breakfast gives you the parterre with the light low on the fortress and almost nobody in it. The palace interior is accessible in part: visitors can climb the Angel Staircase and see the Marble Hall when no ceremony is taking place, and evening chamber concerts there are the reliable way to sit inside. The gardens are level and paved, with ramps at the terrace, which makes them one of the easiest historic sites in the city to move around.

Getting there and timing. Mirabell is five minutes on foot from Salzburg's main railway station down Rainerstrasse, and about ten minutes from the old town over the Makartsteg footbridge. The flowerbeds are replanted twice a year and are at their strongest from late May through September; in winter the parterre is bare earth and the sculptures are boxed against frost, which changes the experience completely. The rose garden on the upper terrace is at its best in June. Salzburg's Advent markets bring an extra reason to come in December, when the garden is quiet and the fortress is floodlit above the empty beds.