Most people visit
Vienna with
a vivid image of the city in their
minds: a monumental vision of
Habsburg palaces, trotting white
horses, old ladies in fur coats and
mountains of fat cream cakes. And
they're unlikely to be disappointed,
for the city positively feeds off
imperial nostalgia - High Baroque
churches and aristocratic mansions
pepper the Innere Stadt, monumental
projects from the late nineteenth
century line the Ringstrasse, and
postcards of the Emperor Franz-Josef
and his beautiful wife Elisabeth
still sell by the sackful. Just as
compelling as the old Habsburg
stand-bys are the wonderful
Jugendstil and early Modernist
buildings, products of the era of
Freud, Klimt, Schiele, Mahler and
Schönberg, when the city's famous
coffeehouses were filled with
intellectuals from every corner of
the empire. Without doubt, this was
Vienna's golden age, after which all
has been decline: with the end of
the empire in 1918, the city was
reduced from a metropolis of over
two million, capital of a vast
empire of fifty million, to one of
barely more than 1.5 million and
federal capital of a small country
of just eight million souls.
Given the city's
twentieth-century history, it's
hardly surprising that the Viennese
are as keen as anyone to continue
plugging the good old days. The
visual scars from this turbulent
history are comparatively light -
even Hitler's sinister wartime Flacktürme
(anti-aircraft towers) are confined
to the suburbs - though the
destruction of the city's enormous
Jewish community, the driving force
behind the city's fin-de-siècle
culture, is a wound that has proved
harder to heal. The city has
struggled since to live up to the
glorious achievements of its past,
and has failed to shake off a
reputation for xenophobia. Yet for
all its problems, Vienna is still an
inspiring city to visit, with one of
the world's greatest art collections
in the Kunsthistorisches Museum
, world-class orchestras and a
superb architectural heritage. It's
also an eminently civilized place,
clean, safe (for the most part) and
peopled by citizens who do their
best to live up to their reputation
for Gemütlichkeit , or
"cosiness". And despite
its ageing population, it's also a
city with a lively nightlife, with
plenty of late-opening Musikcafés
and drinking holes. Even Vienna's
restaurants, long famous for
quantity over quality, have
discovered more innovative ways of
cooking and are now supplemented by
a wide range of ethnic restaurants.
Most first-time visitors spend
the majority of their time in
Vienna's central district, the Innere
Stadt . Retaining much of its
labyrinthine street layout, it's the
city's main commercial district,
packed with shops, cafés and
restaurants. The chief sight here is
the Stephansdom , Vienna's
finest Gothic edifice, standing at
the district's pedestrianized centre.
Tucked into the southwest corner of
the Innere Stadt is the Hofburg
, the former imperial palace and
seat of the Habsburgs, now housing a
whole host of museums, the best of
which is the Schatzkammer, home to
the crown jewels.
The old fortifications enclosing
the Innere Stadt were torn down in
1857, and over the next three
decades gradually replaced by a
showpiece boulevard called the Ringstrasse
. Nowadays, the Ringstrasse is used
and abused by cars and buses as a
ring road, though it's still
punctuated with the most grandiose
public buildings of late-imperial
Vienna, one of which is home to the
city's new cultural centre, the Museumsquartier
, and another of which houses the
famous Kunsthistorisches Museum
. Beyond the Ringstrasse lie
Vienna's seven Vorstädte ,
or inner suburbs, whose outer
boundary is marked by the
traffic-clogged Gürtel
(literally "belt"), or
ring road. The highlight out here is
the Belvedere , where you can
see a wealth of paintings by
Austria's pre-eminent trio of modern
artists - Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt
and Oskar Kokoschka - followed by
the Prater , east of the
Danube Canal, with its famous Ferris
wheel and funfair. On the whole,
there's little reason to venture
beyond the Gürtel into the Vororte
, or outer suburbs, except to visit Schönbrunn
, the Habsburgs' former summer
residence, a masterpiece of Rococo
excess and an absolute must if only
for the wonderful gardens.
