Budapest [antikvár]

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Budapest is a city that makes an immediate strong impression on the visitor, and not simply because of its dramatically beautiful situation on the Danube. When I came here for the first time twenty-seven years ago, after having spent a previous period in a then moribund Vienna, I was instantly enthralled by Budapest's gaiety and energy, and by the way it exuded all the scale, grandeur, and excitement of a major capital. My response was typical of that of generations of travellers to this city: as early as 1840, over thirty years before the joining together of Buda and Pest, an English visitor called Julia Pardoe wrote: 'there is such a constant variety and movement in [Pest's] streets, such a blending of the Oriental with the European, and such a holiday look about the whole population, that it is impossible to feel ennui in the chief city of the Magyars'. Nearly a century later, when the city was already in cultural and political decline, the Irish wanderer Walter Starkie found that 'life in Budapest moves to a more rapid rhythm than elsewhere in Europe, as though every moment of the day had unlimited possibilities of emotional excitement'. 'Budapest', summarized the Italian author Claudio Magris in 1986, 'is the loveliest city on the Danube. It has a crafty way of being its own stage-set, like Vienna, but also has a robust substance and a vitality unknown to its Austrian rival.' PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IX