Hofburg

Palace · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

The Habsburgs' city palace in Vienna, eighteen wings and nineteen courtyards grown over six centuries, housing the imperial treasury, a riding school and the president.

The Hofburg grew over six centuries into one connected complex, eighteen wings and nineteen courtyards. Each ruler added rather than replaced, so a thirteenth-century core sits against Renaissance and Baroque wings and finally the Neue Burg. That last block, begun in the 1880s and finished in 1913, was designed as one half of a forum whose second half was never built. It is still in daily use: the Austrian president works here, and so do a library, a riding school and several museums. Three sets of interiors are open. The imperial apartments hold the rooms where Franz Joseph slept on an iron camp bed and was woken at half past three each morning. The Sisi Museum spends most of its space taking apart the romantic legend of Empress Elisabeth rather than selling it. The treasury holds the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and a narwhal tusk catalogued for centuries as a unicorn's horn. Outside, the ground opens onto Heldenplatz, the square where the country's twentieth-century crowds assembled.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The Sisi Museum argues with its own subject — it is built to take apart the sentimental version of Elisabeth, which makes it far more interesting than the postcards outside suggest.
Look at the newest wing and note what is missing — the Neue Burg was designed as half of a pair of curved wings framing the square; the other half was never built.
The crown is a separate ticket — Imperial Apartments, Sisi Museum and Silver Collection share one; the Treasury sits in another courtyard on its own ticket, and the Riding School on a third.

Things to do

1
Cross the whole complex on foot
Go in under the dome at Michaelerplatz, through the passage into the In der Burg courtyard, then out through the passage under the Leopoldine Wing onto Heldenplatz, facing the curved front of the Neue Burg. You pass from the medieval core to the last gasp of the empire in about ten minutes, and nobody checks a ticket.
2
Watch the horses work
The Spanish Riding School trains its Lipizzaner stallions in a white Baroque hall with a chandeliered ceiling. The training sessions are practice rather than performance — riders in ordinary clothes, horses stopping and repeating things — and they run on published days rather than every morning.
3
Go and look at the crown
The treasury opens off the Schweizerhof, the oldest courtyard in the complex. The imperial crown is not a circle but an octagon of eight hinged gold plates set with unpolished stones, made in the tenth century to sit over a fabric cap. It looks handmade in a way no photograph manages, and a few cases along, the unicorn's horn turns out to be two and a half metres of narwhal tusk in a gold mount.