Vienna
Vienna City Guide gives you all the relevant information about must see places in Vienna City. Here you can also find the Vienna history, picture, hotels, museums, night life, weather and all the other tips you can think of while visiting Vienna City. Detailed, fully updated information for your attention is given on the left where you can see all the components of the Vienna Travel Guide.
Vienna is ranked among various business and financial centres. Vienna City is often being mentioned in business meetings schedules. Unique historic core lets recognizing Vienna as a place for valuable impression. Vienna Travel Guide is your partner while discovering the essentials of exclusive sightseeing experience. From the past moments till the modern cuisine – revealing tips in Vienna City Guide.
About Vienna:
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.
More so than anywhere else in Austria, Vienna has a huge variety of places to eat and drink , from Beisln , the Viennese version of a local pub, to upmarket restaurants, as well as a wide range of cuisines, from Balkan to South American. Even the country's ubiquitous protein-heavy food is given a new lift in the capital thanks to the popularity of Neu Wiener Küche , the Viennese version of nouvelle cuisine , which uses fresh produce to give a slightly Mediterranean bent to traditional dishes.
Vienna is, of course, also home of the Kaffeehaus , and has by far the largest selection in the country. While the rest of the world queues up for fast food, the Viennese Kaffeehaus implores you to slow down; as the sign in one such café says, "sorry, we do not cater for people in a hurry." For the price of a small coffee, you can sit for as long as you like without being asked to move on or buy another drink. Understandably, then, the price of this first drink is astronomical and will regularly set you back around öS35/¬2.54.
Eating and drinking establishments are divided into Kaffeehäuser , incorporating snack bars and Kaffee-Konditorei, and restaurants , which includes some of the city's Beisln . Phone numbers have been given only for those restaurants where it's advisable to book a table . Don't get too excited by those places that boast a Schanigarten , as this is rarely much of a garden; simply a few tables alfresco. For more pleasant, atmospheric alfresco eating and drinking, you need to head off to one of the simple Heurigen in the wine-making suburbs.
Vienna is, of course, also home of the Kaffeehaus , and has by far the largest selection in the country. While the rest of the world queues up for fast food, the Viennese Kaffeehaus implores you to slow down; as the sign in one such café says, "sorry, we do not cater for people in a hurry." For the price of a small coffee, you can sit for as long as you like without being asked to move on or buy another drink. Understandably, then, the price of this first drink is astronomical and will regularly set you back around öS35/¬2.54.
Eating and drinking establishments are divided into Kaffeehäuser , incorporating snack bars and Kaffee-Konditorei, and restaurants , which includes some of the city's Beisln . Phone numbers have been given only for those restaurants where it's advisable to book a table . Don't get too excited by those places that boast a Schanigarten , as this is rarely much of a garden; simply a few tables alfresco. For more pleasant, atmospheric alfresco eating and drinking, you need to head off to one of the simple Heurigen in the wine-making suburbs.
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