Vienna
A capital that outlived its empire
Vienna was built to run an empire that no longer exists. The Ringstrasse palaces, the ministries, the museums and the opera house all went up in the last decades of Habsburg rule, for a state that dissolved in 1918 and left the city sized for something far larger than the country around it. What remains is a capital of just over two million with the infrastructure and the manners of one twice that: enormous public rooms, heavily subsidised culture, municipal housing on a scale nobody else attempted, and a coffee-house habit that treats sitting still as a legitimate use of an afternoon.
A Roman garrison called Vindobona stood here on the Danube frontier, and the medieval town that grew after it came under Habsburg rule from 1278 — a dynasty that held it for some six and a half centuries. Ottoman armies besieged the city twice, in 1529 and 1683; both sieges were lifted, and the wrecked suburbs left by the second were rebuilt in the Baroque that still shapes the centre. The nineteenth century brought the empire's peak and its most visible act: in 1857 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 housing for the working class 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 city's Jewish population — a large part of what had made Vienna what it was. Allied powers occupied and divided the city until 1955.
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.
Feel the city
The intangible side — what you remember after
Top experiences
If you do nothing else, do these — in order
Places
Tap a pin, or a place, to preview it on the map
Historic & landmarks 7
Mosques & churches 2
Bazaars & markets 1
Museums & galleries 3
Streets & nightlife 1
Viewpoints & parks 2
Beyond the city
The Danube valley, the Wachau vineyards, Bratislava and the reed beds of the Neusiedler See all sit within an hour or two of the city.
Know before you go
The practical side
May, June, September and October are the balance. July and August are hot and the opera house is dark. From mid-November the Christmas markets open, when Vienna is at its most crowded and prettiest at once. January and February are grey and quiet.
Grüß Gott on the way into a shop. Titles matter here more than almost anywhere in Europe — a doctorate goes on the doorbell. In a coffee house you are never hurried and should not hurry either; ordering and leaving inside twenty minutes reads as strange rather than efficient.
Vienna is among the safest large cities in Europe, and the tap water arrives by pipeline from alpine springs, so bottled water is money thrown away. The practical surprise is cash: it is used far more here than in western Europe, and plenty of small places take nothing else.
The euro, and carry some. Austria is attached to cash in a way that catches visitors out, and a fair number of coffee houses, wine taverns and small restaurants still refuse cards. Tipping means rounding up and saying the total as you hand the money over.