Things to do
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Albertina
A palace on the bastion at the end of the Hofburg, holding a graphic collection of about a million prints and sixty thousand drawings, including Dürer's hare, which is shown rarely because paper cannot take the light. The permanent hang is Monet to Picasso instead, in state rooms restored to their Habsburg fittings.
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Hofburg
The winter palace, added to by almost every ruler for seven centuries, so it reads as a small walled town of courtyards. Three visits sit inside it: the imperial apartments, the silver collection and the rooms on Empress Elisabeth. The president works in one wing and the national library's baroque hall is in another.
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Kaisergruft
Under the Capuchin church, one hundred and fifty Habsburgs in tin and copper sarcophagi, from plain boxes to Maria Theresa's double tomb with its lid figures sitting up. The order still keeps it. The hearts are elsewhere, in the Augustinerkirche, and the viscera under the cathedral, which is how the family was buried.
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Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien
Built to hold what the Habsburgs collected, which means the largest group of Bruegels anywhere, a Vermeer, Velázquez portraits of the Spanish cousins and an Egyptian wing. Klimt painted the spandrels above the staircase. The café under the dome is a destination on its own. Allow half a day and skip the ground floor if pressed.
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Leopold Museum
An ophthalmologist spent fifty years buying Austrian modernism when nobody wanted it, and the state bought the result in 1994. It holds the largest group of Egon Schiele paintings in existence, along with Klimt and Wiener Werkstätte design. The white limestone box it sits in is deliberately plain. Inside the MuseumsQuartier courtyard.
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MuseumsQuartier
The imperial stables, converted in 2001 into one of the larger museum complexes in Europe: the Leopold with its Schiele holdings, a black basalt block of modern art, an architecture centre and a children's museum. Coloured benches fill the courtyard and the city sits in it on summer evenings without paying for anything.
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Schloss Belvedere
Two baroque palaces at either end of a terraced garden, built for Prince Eugene of Savoy after he broke the Ottoman advance. The upper one holds Klimt's Kiss, which is the reason most come, along with Schiele and Kokoschka. The lower palace takes exhibitions. The garden between them is free and the view back at the city is the point.
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Schloss Schönbrunn
Maria Theresa's summer residence, yellow and enormous, with a park that rises to a colonnade on the hill behind and the oldest surviving zoo in the world in one corner. Timed tickets cover twenty-two or forty rooms. The gardens, the maze and the Gloriette terrace are open without one, and the park opens at first light.
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Spanische Hofreitschule
Lipizzaner stallions trained in the classical school since 1565, working in a white baroque hall inside the Hofburg. Full performances run on set dates and sell out; the morning exercise is cheaper, less formal and shows the same horses doing the same work. Both need booking, and the stables are visited separately.
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Stephansdom
Diamond-patterned roof tiles over a Gothic nave in the exact centre of the city, its south tower climbed by three hundred and forty-three steps to a watch room used to spot fires. The catacombs below hold plague pits and the Habsburg viscera. Roof and catacombs are separately ticketed; the nave is free as far as the crossing.
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Wiener Karlskirche
Promised during the plague of 1713 and finished in 1737, with two columns copied from Trajan's in Rome flanking a Greek portico and a green dome, which should not work together and does. A lift installed for restoration carries visitors up inside the cupola to the frescoes, close enough to see the brushwork.
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Wiener Naschmarkt
A long market over the covered river Wien, running from Karlsplatz for about a kilometre: Turkish and Balkan grocers at one end, restaurants at the other, and a large flea market along the far side on Saturdays. Prices at the tourist end are not the local ones. Closed Sunday, and best walked before noon.
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Wiener Prater
Imperial hunting ground until Joseph II opened it to the city in 1766, now six square kilometres of meadow and woodland with a permanent funfair at the near corner. A straight avenue of chestnuts runs the length of it. The fairground has no gate and no entry charge; each ride is paid for separately.
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Wiener Riesenrad
A Ferris wheel of 1897 with wooden cabins the size of a small room, burnt in the war and rebuilt with half its original number, which is why the gaps between them are so wide. Orson Welles filmed the scene that made it famous in The Third Man. One slow revolution takes about fifteen minutes.
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Wiener Staatsoper
Opened in 1869 to such hostile reviews that one of its architects took his own life, burnt out in 1945 and rebuilt behind the surviving facade. It stages a different work almost every night of a ten-month season. Standing places go on sale eighty minutes before curtain for the price of a coffee, and the queue forms early.
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Wiener Zentralfriedhof
Three million graves over two and a half square kilometres, larger in population than the living city, with a group of honorary tombs holding Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and the Strauss family in one plot. Mozart has a memorial here and lies elsewhere. Tram 71 runs to the gates and the sections are numbered from them.