Vienna celebrates the 125th anniversary of its iconic Ferris Wheel
This year Vienna celebrates 125 years since the inauguration of one of its best-known icons, the Ferris Wheel (Wiener Riesenrad). With a diameter of over 60 meters, the highest in Europe until 1985, it was built in 1897 to celebrate the jubilee of the ascent to the throne of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Designed by the British Harry Hitchins and Hubert Cecil Booth, it had to compete with the Wheel of Chicago, built in 1893, and the Grande Roue de Paris which was under construction and would come into operation in the year 1900 for the Universal Exposition.
For the 125th anniversary of the Viennese Wheel, between the end of June and the 2nd of July there will be great celebrations, the theatrical performance of the Nesterval Ensemble, and the brand new Platform n.9, a daring rotating platform of glass and steel which on the which can be safely climbed to admire the city. There Wiener Riesenrad, today a symbol of tourism that is restarting in Vienna after the pandemic, stands at the entrance to the Prater, a green lung in the city center with attractions dedicated to adults and children. The area is mentioned in a 12th century document which certifies the donation of the land by the Emperor Frederick I to the noble De Prato family; the name Prater instead compares for the first time in a text of 1403. We owe the transformation of the Prater into a public park to the Emperor Joseph II: in 1766 the sovereign also granted the opening of elegant cafes inside it. In 1873, the park hosted the Universal Exposition. The opening of one of the first and most popular attractions, “Venice in Vienna” (Venedig in Wien), dates back to May 1895, with canals, gondolas and lagoon-style houses. The park can be reached by underground Vienna U-Bahn.
In 1916, the Ferris Wheel was about to be destroyed, but was spared due to lack of funds; in 1944 it caught fire, but after the war, like the Cathedral of St. Stephen, the Opera House and the Burgtheater, all symbols of Vienna, it was rebuilt, so much so that it compares in some of the central scenes of “The Third Man” of 1949 The author of the subject of the film, shot in a splendid black and white with an expressionist flavor, is the English writer Graham Greene who completed the script together with the British director Carol Reed. Set in a war-torn Vienna, it stars Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard. It is right under the Ferris Wheel that Welles utters the most famous sentence of the film: “In Italy, for 30 years, under the Borgias, there were wars, terror, murders, bloodbaths, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance . In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock ». The consideration made the Swiss indignant who, rightly, protested saying, in fact, the cuckoo clock was invented by the German clockmaker Franz Ketterer, a native of the Black Forest, Germany.
Other films have been shot between the Wheel and the Prater, including: “007 danger zone” from 1987, and “Before dawn” by Richard Linklater from 1995. From Cinema to Art: an engraving of 1919, made by the painter Emma Bormann portrays the Wheel in perfect expressionist style. And at the Theater, because this year’s celebrations will see the Nesterval Ensemble bring among the people a play inspired by the history of the Wheel, with characters such as the Emperor himself, Sigmund Freud, Romy Schneider: the vision of the staging is included in the ticket for the Ferris wheel.
A good address to stay in Vienna this season, which the English weekly The Economist awarded as the most liveable city in the world in 2022, is the 4-star Hotel Beethoven Wien which, on each of its six floors, celebrates one of the characteristic elements of the Viennese capital: the Literary Cafes, the Viennese (artistic) Secession, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, the Viennese Theater, the famous people of the city, the audacious Viennese women of the late nineteenth century.
in the’innin a very central location, Papagenogasse 6, the double for 2 people with breakfast, starts at 100 euros.