Gloriette

One of the nicest things to do on a winter’s day in Vienna is to go to the Schonbrunn Palace and take a long walk on the huge grounds surrounding the place. If you’re feeling especially industrious, there is a beautiful fragment of an uncompleted second castle called the Gloriette high up on a hill overlooking Schonbrunn and almost the entire Vienna skyline below. It’s a breathtaking view, especially in the crisp, cold late afternoon air and light of a December day. We hadn’t seen each other in many years so there was much to talk about as we walked along arm in arm across crunching snow, eventually climbing slowly up the winding path to the Gloriette, taking our time going nowhere happily on the snow white/green/brown grounds of that beautiful place. Inevitably on afternoons such as these at some point you stop and think could life be any better? And smiling, you shake your head no, it could not.

Jonathan Carroll is the author of over 20 novels and short story collections. His latest novel “Bathing the Lion” is now available in trade paperback. If you liked this piece, there’s lots more on his monthly newsletter. You can subscribe here