🇦🇹 Austria · Vienna and the East (Lower Austria)
Few cities breathe as much history, as much music and as much elegance as Vienna. The capital of Austria and the former centre of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was for more than six centuries the seat of the Habsburg dynasty, and that imperial legacy is felt on every corner: monumental palaces, stately avenues, baroque churches and a historic centre listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Walking the Ring — the great circular boulevard around the centre — is like strolling through an open-air museum of the 19th century.
But Vienna is not only marble and gold: it is, above all, the city of music. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, Brahms and the Strauss family lived and composed here; the Viennese waltz was born here, and the State Opera, the Philharmonic and the New Year's concert are still world-famous events today. And it is also the city of coffee: the great Viennese coffee houses, with their marble tables, their newspapers on wooden holders and their Sachertorte, are an institution recognised by Unesco as intangible cultural heritage, a place to sit for hours with nobody hurrying you.
This guide covers the essentials of Vienna in a practical, friendly way: how to organise the great palaces, which museums to choose, where to hear good music, how to get around on its impeccable public transport and how to let yourself be carried along by the easy rhythm of a city that, year after year, tops the world quality-of-life rankings. Vienna combines the grandeur of the past with a comfort and cleanliness that few places match, making it a pleasure to travel in.
Vienna began as the Roman camp of Vindobona, built in the 1st century on the Danube to guard the empire's frontier. After centuries as a frontier post, in 1156 it became the residence of the Babenberg dukes and, from the end of the 13th century, the centre of power of the Habsburg dynasty, which would rule it until 1918. Vienna withstood two great Ottoman sieges, in 1529 and 1683; the second, lifted with the help of the Polish king John III Sobieski, marked the beginning of the end of Turkish expansion in central Europe. Once the Ottoman danger was past, the city flourished in the baroque, with palaces such as the Belvedere and Schönbrunn. In the 18th century, under Empress Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, Vienna went through deep reforms and a cultural golden age in which Haydn and Mozart shone. The Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) reorganised Europe after Napoleon, and in the mid-19th century Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the walls torn down to build the majestic Ring. Around 1900, 'fin-de-siècle Vienna' was one of the cultural capitals of the world: Gustav Klimt and the Secession in art, Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis, Otto Wagner in architecture. The assassination of the heir to the throne in Sarajevo, in 1914, set off the First World War, after which the empire fell. Annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and damaged in the Second World War, Vienna was divided into occupation zones until Austria regained full sovereignty in 1955. Since then it has been reborn as a prosperous capital, home to UN agencies and, repeatedly, the city with the best quality of life in the world. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: the imperial Habsburg capital with its Ring and its palaces, the Danube and the Wachau valley, and Linz, the industrial city marked by its Nazi past. This is where Austria was born as a state and where its history beat for a thousand years.
Read the history of Vienna and the East (Lower Austria) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the palaces and the waltzes, what is now Vienna was a frontier. Around the 1st century AD, the Romans set up a military camp called Vindobona in this bend of the Danube, part of the defensive line of the limes that protected the province of Pannonia from the Germanic peoples on the other side of the river. Vindobona came to hold a legion and a civilian population of several thousand people; it is thought that the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius died near here, in the year 180, during the campaigns against the Marcomanni. Remains of that settlement still turn up now and then beneath the modern centre of Vienna.
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Vindobona emptied out and the region passed into the hands of various peoples. The name 'Wien' (Vienna) reappears in documents in the Middle Ages, and the city grew as a strategic stronghold on the Danube. The great leap came with the Babenberg dynasty, which made Vienna its residence in 1156 and raised Austria to the rank of a duchy. Under the Babenbergs the first great church was built and the city began to take shape as a regional capital.
In 1278, after the Battle of Marchfeld, Rudolf I of Habsburg defeated the Bohemian king Ottokar II and the Habsburgs took control of Austria. That was the beginning of the association between this family and Vienna that would last more than six centuries and would in time make the city one of the great capitals of Europe.
From the end of the 13th century and, above all, from the 15th, Vienna was the centre of power of the House of Habsburg, the dynasty that would come to reign over much of Europe with the motto 'A.E.I.O.U.' and the famous policy of marriages ('Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry'). In 1452, Frederick III was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and from then on the imperial crown stayed almost permanently in Habsburg hands, with Vienna as one of their main seats.
The city filled up with institutions of government and of the court: the Hofburg, the imperial palace in the heart of the city, kept growing century after century, adding wings, courtyards and styles according to the taste of each emperor. Vienna became the political, military and religious capital of a vast conglomerate of kingdoms and territories. St Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom), with its unmistakable glazed tile roof and its very tall south tower, became the spiritual symbol of the city and rose higher through the Gothic centuries.
That central position had a price: Vienna was also central Europe's gateway facing the Ottoman Empire, then at its height of expansion. The walled city prepared to hold out, and that role as a frontier bastion would shape two of the most dramatic episodes in its history.
For centuries, Vienna was the frontier between the Christendom of central Europe and the power of the Ottoman Empire. Twice the sultan's armies reached its walls intending to take it, and twice the city held out, in episodes that were burned into European memory.
The first siege came in 1529, when Suleiman the Magnificent, having conquered Hungary, marched on Vienna with an enormous army. The rainy autumn, the logistical difficulties and the resistance of the garrison thwarted the attack, and the Ottomans withdrew. But the threat did not go away: the city strengthened its walls and lived for more than a century in the shadow of a new offensive.
It came in 1683, in what is perhaps the most famous episode in Viennese history. A great Ottoman army commanded by the grand vizier Kara Mustafa besieged the city for two months. Vienna was on the brink of falling when, on 12 September 1683, a Christian coalition led by King John III Sobieski of Poland — with troops from the Holy Roman Empire and several German principalities — came down from the Kahlenberg and broke the Ottoman army at the Battle of Vienna, with one of the greatest cavalry charges in history. The victory marked the start of the Ottoman retreat from Europe. Legend — not entirely confirmed — traces to this episode the origin of Viennese coffee (from the sacks of coffee abandoned by the Turks) and even of the crescent-shaped croissant.
Once the Ottoman danger receded, Vienna went through a golden age. The 17th and 18th centuries brought the baroque, and the aristocracy and the court competed to raise dazzling palaces. The architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and other masters gave the city gems such as St Charles's Church (Karlskirche), the Belvedere palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy — the general who had defeated the Ottomans — and the great extension of Schönbrunn, the imperial summer palace conceived as the Austrian answer to Versailles.
The 18th century is dominated by the figure of Maria Theresa, the only woman to govern the Habsburg dominions (1740-1780). The mother of sixteen children — among them Marie Antoinette, future queen of France — Maria Theresa modernised the state, reformed the army, the administration and education, and drove a period of prosperity. Her son Joseph II carried out more radical enlightened reforms, in tune with the spirit of the age.
That prosperous, refined Vienna became the musical capital of Europe. Under the patronage of the court and the aristocracy, the city attracted or saw the birth of the greatest composers of classicism: Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — who settled in Vienna and died here in 1791 — and, moving into the 19th century, Ludwig van Beethoven. Vienna's fame as 'the city of music' was born, and would reach its peak with the Strauss family and the waltz.
The 19th century changed the look of Vienna for ever. In 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered the demolition of the old medieval walls that surrounded the centre and that had become obsolete. In their place the Ringstrasse was laid out, a majestic circular boulevard flanked by monumental buildings that became the stage for public life: the State Opera, the Parliament (in classical Greek style), the City Hall (neo-Gothic), the University, the Burgtheater and the great museums of Art History and Natural History. This period of eclectic, historicist architecture is known as the 'Ringstrasse style'.
At the same time, Vienna lived through one of the most fertile cultural moments in European history, known as 'fin-de-siècle Vienna' or 'Wiener Moderne'. In the first decades around 1900, the city was a hotbed of ideas and art: the painter Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession movement broke with academicism; Otto Wagner revolutionised architecture; Sigmund Freud was founding psychoanalysis; Arnold Schoenberg was transforming music; and writers, scientists and thinkers crossed paths in the coffee houses. It was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a mosaic of peoples who converged on Vienna.
That brilliant, cosmopolitan world collapsed with the First World War. The defeat of 1918 dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Vienna — a capital built to govern more than fifty million people — was left at the head of a small Alpine republic of barely six or seven million.
The First Austrian Republic, born in 1918, was a turbulent period. In the 'Red Vienna' of the 1920s, the city's social democratic government drove an ambitious social housing programme — with emblematic complexes such as the Karl-Marx-Hof — and pioneering social policies. But the economic crisis, political conflict and the rise of authoritarianism led to a civil war in 1934 and to an Austrofascist regime.
In March 1938 came the Anschluss: the annexation of Austria by Hitler's Nazi Germany, greeted in Vienna by crowds on the Heldenplatz. The following years were tragic: Vienna's prosperous, creative Jewish community — which had given the world Freud and so many artists and scientists — was persecuted, driven out and, in large part, murdered in the Holocaust. The city was bombed during the Second World War and taken by the Red Army in 1945.
After the war, Austria and Vienna were divided into occupation zones by the four Allied powers, a situation immortalised on film in 'The Third Man'. The occupation ended in 1955 with the State Treaty, which returned full sovereignty to Austria in exchange for its permanent neutrality. Since then, Vienna has rebuilt itself and prospered: today it is a prosperous, safe and green city, home to UN agencies and to OPEC, repeatedly ranked among the cities with the best quality of life in the world. Its historic centre, with the legacy of the Habsburgs and of the Ringstrasse, has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2001.