The Austrian Parliament is a Greek temple on the Ringstrasse, standing between the palace gardens and the city hall in a costume no other building on the boulevard wears. A ramp climbs to the portico past bronze horse-tamers, with the Pallas Athene fountain below it, and along the roofline stand philosophers, writers and statesmen of Greek and Roman antiquity. The empire it was built for was not a democracy. Since the house came back into the building in 2023, after five years of works and five years of sitting elsewhere, most of it is open to anyone who walks in.
Inside, the visit is unusually open for a working parliament. A visitor centre lays out how the two chambers work, and the library keeps a café beside it. The Hall of Pillars is the room that stops people: monolithic marble columns the height of a house, holding up a hall that runs the width of the building. Best of all you can sit in on a sitting. The public galleries open when the house meets, and what you hear from up there is the ordinary business of a country, argued in a room dressed as ancient Greece.