In a country without gold, silver, or even a port, salt deposits from the prehistoric sea under the alps was a precious resource for trade. People received their wages in salt. The city of Salzburg and the Salzkammergut region of the country both take their names from the so-called white gold.
It’s easy to forget this when you stand in Spar, listening to Europop on the supermarket radio and weighing up boxes of salt that cost less than €2 a kilo. But, in 2003, Austria was reminded of how different things had once been. When the fifth most high-value art theft in history took place in Vienna, the world’s media, the police, gallery directors and the public were fixated on a salt cellar.