Albertina Modern opened in 2020 as the contemporary wing of Vienna celebrated Albertina museum, devoted to modern and contemporary art from the end of the Second World War to the present day. It occupies the Kunstlerhaus on Karlsplatz, a grand historicist exhibition hall built in the 1860s as a gift from the Emperor Franz Joseph to the city artists, now elegantly restored and modernised. The new institution draws on a vast holding of more than sixty thousand works by some five thousand artist.....

Founded in 1776 by Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, the Albertina in Vienna holds one of the largest and most valuable collections of graphic art in the world, more than a million prints and tens of thousands of drawings spanning five centuries. Set in a former Habsburg residential palace at the southern tip of the Hofburg, on a bastion of the old city walls, it ranks among the most prestigious art museums anywhere. The duke, who had married a favourite daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, asse.....

An eighty-metre baroque hall lined with leather-bound volumes and crowned by a frescoed dome, the State Hall of the Austrian National Library is one of the most beautiful library interiors in the world. Built between 1721 and 1723 to designs by the imperial architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and completed by his son, it forms part of the Hofburg complex in the centre of Vienna and was conceived as the grand court library of the Habsburgs. The hall rises some twenty metres to a ceili.....

Greek temple columns, marble ramps and a golden statue of the goddess Athena give the Austrian Parliament Building the air of an ancient acropolis transplanted to the Vienna Ringstrasse. Designed by the architect Theophil Hansen and built between 1874 and 1883, it was conceived in a Greek Revival style as a deliberate evocation of the birthplace of democracy, a fitting symbol for the legislature of the Habsburg empire and later the Austrian republic. The building most famous feature is the Pa.....

An early masterpiece of modern architecture, the Austrian Postal Savings Bank was designed by Otto Wagner and built between 1904 and 1906 as a radical break from the historicist styles that filled the Vienna Ringstrasse. Its facade, clad in thin marble panels fixed with visible aluminium bolts, made a virtue of its materials and construction, announcing a new, honest approach to building that influenced architects across Europe. The interior is the great surprise. The central banking hall is .....

Set in a grand baroque palace just behind the Vienna State Opera, the Austrian Theatre Museum gathers the rich heritage of the stage in a city famous for its drama, opera and music. It occupies the Palais Lobkowitz, a seventeenth-century aristocratic mansion whose grand Eroica Hall, named after the Beethoven symphony first performed there, is a highlight in its own right. The museum collections trace the history of theatre, opera and dance, holding hundreds of thousands of items, from stage d.....

A pavilion of glass and steel, light and transparent, Belvedere 21 is Vienna home for art of the present day, the contemporary wing of the great Belvedere museum. The building has a notable history of its own, designed by the architect Karl Schwanzer as the Austrian pavilion for the Brussels World Fair of 1958 and later dismantled and re-erected in Vienna, where its clean modernist lines still feel strikingly forward-looking. After serving for years as a museum of the twentieth century, the p.....

Built as the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the brilliant military commander who served the Habsburgs, the Belvedere is among the finest baroque ensembles in Europe. Designed by the architect Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, it comprises two palaces, the Lower Belvedere completed by 1716 and the grander Upper Belvedere finished in 1723, linked by a formal terraced garden that descends between them. The Upper Belvedere, conceived less as a home than as a stage for receptions and disp.....

A relaxed green retreat tucked beside the Hofburg, the Burggarten was once the private garden of the emperors and is now one of the most popular parks in central Vienna. Laid out in the English landscape style after an earlier formal garden was destroyed, it opened to the public in 1919 following the fall of the monarchy, and its lawns have been a favourite spot to lounge in the sun ever since. The park is dotted with monuments to figures associated with the imperial court, the best known bei.....

Beneath a plain friars church on the Neuer Markt, where the emperors of Austria lie buried, a programme of concerts brings live classical music to one of the most historically charged settings in Vienna. The Capuchin Church, run by the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, is famous above all for the Imperial Crypt in its vaults, the resting place of the Habsburg dynasty, and concerts staged in and around the church draw on that solemn atmosphere. The performances typically present the music most a.....