Vienna

Vienna is a city of enormous rooms. The palaces, the opera house, the ministries and the museums along the Ringstrasse were built at imperial scale, and they are still in daily use rather than roped off. You can hear the opera, walk the state rooms at Schönbrunn, stand in front of Klimt's Kiss, and sit as long as you like in a coffee house. Music is not a museum piece here either — the city that kept Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Mahler still puts on more concerts in a week than any visitor can get to. All of it belonged to an empire that dissolved in 1918, leaving a capital of just over two million sized for something far larger.

A Roman garrison called Vindobona stood here on the Danube frontier. The town that grew after it came under Habsburg rule in 1278, and the dynasty held it for six and a half centuries. Ottoman armies besieged it twice, in 1529 and 1683; both sieges were lifted, and the suburbs the second wrecked were rebuilt in the Baroque that still shapes the centre. The empire's peak left its most visible mark in 1857, when the walls came down and the Ringstrasse went up in their place. Around 1900 the city produced Freud, Klimt, Schiele, Mahler, Loos and Wittgenstein more or less at once. The empire ended in 1918, and the socialist city government that followed built working-class housing on a scale attempted nowhere else. In 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria to broad public welcome here, and the regime and its Viennese collaborators drove out or murdered the Jewish population that had made much of what Vienna was. Allied powers divided the city until the State Treaty of May 1955; that October Austria wrote permanent neutrality into its constitution. Neutral ground proved useful ground: since 1979 Vienna has been one of the UN's four headquarters, alongside New York, Geneva and Nairobi.

Two days do the Ring, one palace and two museums. Four let you add the outer districts, an evening of music, and a hillside wine tavern with the city laid out below.