The story of this place
Klagenfurt, capital of Carinthia near the Italian and Slovenian borders, was rebuilt as a Renaissance ideal city after a devastating fire in 1590, its grid of arcaded courtyards designed by Italian architects. Its emblem is the Lindwurm, a winged dragon whose 16th-century fountain statue was modelled—remarkably—on the skull of a woolly rhinoceros unearthed nearby, making it one of the earliest reconstructions of a prehistoric animal in art. Legend held the beast once terrorised the marshes until slain by the city's founders. Beside the town lies the warm Wörthersee, a fashionable lakeside resort since the 19th century.