Things to do
12-
Doppelwendeltreppe Graz
Two stone spirals of 1499 that separate at each landing and rejoin at the next, cut so that a climber can see the other flight through the openings and never meet anyone on it. Local guides call it the stairway of reconciliation. It is inside the Burg and free, behind a door with no sign on it.
-
Grazer Burg
What survives of the imperial residence, now provincial government offices, entered freely through an archway off the cathedral square. Most of the complex is nineteenth-century rebuilding around two courtyards. The reason to walk in is in the far corner, up a stair tower behind an unmarked door.
-
Grazer Dom
Late Gothic, built for Frederick III in the 1440s, its south wall carrying a faded fresco of 1485 that lists the three plagues of the year: locusts, the Turks and the Black Death. Two Italian ivory chests flank the choir. The mausoleum next door is entered separately and is the more startling building.
-
Grazer Landhaus
A Lombard architect gave the province its parliament house in the 1550s, and the arcaded courtyard behind the plain street front is the finest Renaissance interior north of Italy. Concerts are held in it in summer. A bronze well cover of 1590 stands in the middle and the arms depot adjoins it.
-
Grazer Murinsel
Vito Acconci moored a steel half-shell in the middle of the river in 2003 for the city's year as European capital of culture, holding a café, a small amphitheatre and a children's slide, joined to both banks by footbridges. It was meant to be temporary. The current runs visibly under the glass.
-
Grazer Schloßberg
A wooded dolomite hill in the middle of the city, fortified for six centuries and then blown up under the terms of a peace treaty, leaving a park of bastion walls, a cistern and an open-air stage. Tunnels cut as wartime shelters run through the base and one of them now carries the lift.
-
Grazer Uhrturm
The clock tower on the Schlossberg, kept when Napoleon's troops demolished the rest of the fortress in 1809 because the townspeople bought it back. Its hands are reversed, the long one telling hours, because that was all a distant eye could read. Reached by a lift inside the rock, a funicular or two hundred and sixty steps.
-
Hauptplatz
The market square since the twelfth century, triangular because three roads met here, with a painted seventeenth-century house on the north side and a fountain to Archduke Johann in the middle. Trams cross it constantly. Sausage stands at the foot of the Sporgasse are an institution and the queue moves fast.
-
Kunsthaus Graz
A bulbous blue skin of acrylic panels grafted onto a cast-iron warehouse in 2003, nicknamed the friendly alien, with lamps behind the surface that turn the whole thing into a low-resolution screen at night. There is no permanent collection; it takes contemporary exhibitions. The nozzles on the roof are its only daylight.
-
Landeszeughaus
Four floors of an arsenal left as it was stocked in the seventeenth century: about thirty-two thousand helmets, breastplates, muskets and halberds on wooden racks, enough to equip an army of five thousand. Nothing is behind glass and the sheer repetition is the exhibit. It closes in winter apart from booked tours.
-
Mausoleum Kaiser Ferdinands II.
Ferdinand II began his own tomb in 1614 and died before it was finished; Fischer von Erlach completed the interior as his first commission, in white and pink stucco under an oval dome. The emperor who launched the Thirty Years War lies in the crypt beside his mother. Opening hours are short and seasonal.
-
Schloss Eggenberg
Built from 1625 as a calendar in stone: three hundred and sixty-five windows, twenty-four state rooms on the top floor, twelve of them with a window for each hour. The Planetary Room carries the whole scheme in paint. Peacocks work the park outside and a coin cabinet and archaeological museum share the grounds.