Vienna (Wien) — city and federal state
Wien is two cities wearing one costume. Read more
The only building in Vienna that predates the empire's self-image and outlived it — and the catacombs are where the Habsburg body-splitting habit becomes real rather than anecdotal.
Fifteen wooden rooms turning slowly over a hundred-and-thirty-year-old funfair at dusk. It is the one piece of Vienna kitsch that has genuinely earned itself.
The courtyards are free, open all hours and full of Viennese lying on plastic loungers — the best public space in the city, and you don't need a ticket to anything.
The panorama lift puts you 32 metres up, close enough to touch a 1730 dome fresco. No other baroque church in Europe offers that.
Maulbertsch's first great fresco cycle, in a Hildebrandt church, free and empty, four hundred metres past where the tour groups turn back.
The Sisi Museum is the rare imperial attraction that argues with its own gift shop — it uses her own hairbrushes and dresses to take the myth apart.
A 260-year-old funfair with no gate and no owner, where a 1913 wooden slide operates fifty metres from a 117-metre drop tower. Come after dark.
A 1985 council block designed to prove that straight lines are a machine's idea. Fifteen minutes outside is enough — the museum five minutes away is the substantial version.
Four streets of restored eighteenth-century houses, closed to cars, that the city was going to demolish in the 1970s — and the best Christmas market in Vienna in December.
Klimt's Beethoven Frieze — thirty-four metres of it, painted for one 1902 exhibition and never meant to survive — under the golden cabbage.
Maria Theresia and Franz Stephan sitting up in bed looking at each other for eternity, with Joseph II in a plain copper box alongside — the whole argument between baroque and Enlightenment Austria, in one vault.
A memorial you cannot enter, cannot read and cannot walk around comfortably — the most articulate object in a city that took forty years to start admitting what it did.
Kohlmarkt is engineered to end on the Hofburg dome and Graben is engineered to make you look up — a five-minute walk that explains the whole city's self-presentation.
Twelve Bruegels in one room. There is no second place — the next-largest holding anywhere is less than half this size.
The largest Klimt collection in the world, in the palace it was always meant to hang in — and a Schiele holding that hits harder than the Klimt does.
Forty-odd Schieles in one place. Nowhere else has more than a fraction of this, and seeing them in sequence is unlike any other museum hour in Europe.
Free. Permanently. The best account of the city anywhere, including Adolf Loos's actual living room and the original Stephansdom sculptures — and it costs nothing.
Vienna's most reliably interesting temporary shows, plus a permanent Monet-to-Picasso floor and twenty Habsburg rooms — three museums for one ticket, five minutes from the opera.
A 350-year-old market that still functions as a market. Come on Saturday morning, eat at a stall, and watch a neighbourhood do its shopping.
A kilometre of spice, cheese and Balkan groceries on top of a buried river — but only if you walk past the first three hundred metres of restaurant terraces.
Four hundred sellers, one morning a week, and Vienna has had two hundred years to accumulate the contents. Get there before nine.
Four and a half kilometres of car-free chestnut avenue and a floodplain forest, ten minutes from the Ring — the thing the Viennese actually use the Prater for.
The best view in Vienna is free, outside the museum, from the top terrace — and the garden was designed so that the walk up gives it to you in stages.
Thirteen euros buys you a night at one of the world's top opera houses, with your own subtitle screen. Nothing else in Vienna is this good for this little.
The oldest working stage in Vienna, in a room Max Reinhardt had rebuilt after La Fenice, where Beethoven conducted the 1822 reopening.
Stand at the 1901 counter at one o'clock with three Brötchen and a glass of Grüner Veltliner. Four hundred years of Vienna, for about €20.
The 1st district's surviving real Beisl — proper schnitzel and potato salad at a fair price, in a Hermann Czech room, five minutes from the cathedral.
A Käsekrainer at midnight in the company of people in black tie. Open till 4am, two minutes from the opera, and the best sausage in the city.
Proper Viennese Gasthaus cooking at €20–€30 a head, two minutes from the Karmelitermarkt, with the best weekend breakfast in the district.
A hundred years of Budvar and a pork knuckle you pull apart with your hands, under chestnut trees, in the middle of a funfair. There is nothing else like it in Europe.
Otto Zitko painted the entire ceiling, and the kitchen underneath it turns out an 89-point schnitzel until one in the morning.
One of two three-star restaurants in Austria, and the only one you can walk to through a public park. Book months out — or go downstairs to the Meierei instead.
The three-star cheese cellar, at neighbourhood-restaurant prices, in a glass pavilion in a park. The best value in Viennese dining, and it is not close.
An 1858 Wirtshaus with 230 seats, a proper Cordon Bleu and a benchmark goulash, two minutes from the Konzerthaus. Closed Sundays.
A vine-covered, rain-roofed courtyard in a 1700 Spittelberg house, with organic veal schnitzel and prices the rest of the lane abandoned.
Michelin-level vegetable cooking from Paul Ivić's kitchen at bistro prices, in a Spittelberg garden — and it converts people who came under protest.
One of the city's best schnitzels and a Kalbsrahmbeuschel you cannot get anywhere else, in a twenty-table Beisl no tour ever reaches.
Two Michelin stars in two years, from a kitchen with no gas and no electricity — everything on the plate has been through fire.
Boiled beef sounds like a punishment and is Vienna's best dish. Plachutta serves the definitive version, in a copper pot, with instructions.
The restaurant that taught Vienna to share small plates. Fifteen years on it is still the best Japanese food in the city and still nearly impossible to book.
A proper 83-point Viennese Beisl with a big tree-shaded garden, hidden at the back of the MuseumsQuartier where nobody looks for it.
Two thousand wines and 350 spirits in a Gasthaus serving roast pork. There is no better ratio of cellar to bill in Vienna.
Breakfast until three in the afternoon, in a garden, thirty seconds from a Maulbertsch ceiling and three minutes from a Saturday producers' market.
The real thing: a Melange for about €3.40, a rack of newspapers, and permission to sit for three hours in the café Thomas Bernhard couldn't stay away from.
The best cup of coffee in Vienna, from a city whose famous coffee houses are not actually about the coffee.
A coffee house that has not been redecorated since about 1919, in a district no tour bus visits — and breakfast served from seven in the morning until nine at night.
Cake baked by somebody's grandmother from her own recipe, in a café built to give Austrian pensioners an income and something to do.
The full coffee-house experience — newspapers, chess tables, three hours on one Melange — with the best café kitchen in Vienna and none of the tourists.
A coffee house from 1838, two minutes from the Rathaus, with the newspapers, the banquettes and — unexpectedly — real vegan options.
Adolf Loos's manifesto, still open until 04:00 and still serving. Nowhere else can you drink inside a building this consequential.
The best rooftop view of old Vienna, from a bar furnished like a junk shop, with no reservations and prices well under the competition.
No sign, no menu, house slippers. You describe what you like and someone very good makes you a drink you'd never have thought to order.
