Vienna in 3 days: Wittelsbach palaces, art, and Bratislava across the border

Three days in Vienna are enough to dismantle the idea that it is only a city of emperors. The first day is the essential Habsburg one: Schönbrunn, the Hofburg, the cathedral, Klimt. The second is the most interesting and almost nobody does it: turn-of-the-century Vienna, the fifteen years in which Freud, Klimt, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein and Loos worked in the same coffee houses, and half of twentieth-century Europe was born. The third takes a boat or a train up the Danube into the Wachau valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site an hour away.

Day 1 — The Habsburgs

7 km · 3 stops · 9am to 10pm · the essential day

Morning – Schönbrunn

9am-12:30pm · Ticket €22-32 with time slot · Gardens free

The Habsburgs’ summer residence, 1,441 rooms, made what it is by Maria Theresa. In the Hall of Mirrors, in 1762, six-year-old Mozart played for the empress and, legend says, proposed to the young Marie Antoinette. Franz Joseph, who reigned for sixty-eight years, slept here on a military camp bed.

The gardens are free: climb to the Gloriette for the view, and the gardens hold the oldest zoo in the world still operating, from 1752, with the octagonal pavilion where the court had breakfast watching the animals.

Afternoon – Hofburg and the cathedral

1:30-5:30pm · Hofburg about €20 · Cathedral nave free

The Hofburg is the winter residence and grew over seven centuries by adding one wing at a time: eighteen wings, nineteen courtyards, and today it houses the presidency of the republic, four museums and the National Library. Worth seeing: the Sisi Museum, which dismantles the rosy film myth and tells the real person; the Imperial Treasury with the crown of the Holy Roman Empire from around the year 1000; and the National Library’s Prunksaal, one of the finest baroque halls in Europe.

The Stephansdom has a south spire 136 metres tall, climbed by 343 steps. The coloured roof burned in 1945 and was rebuilt with donations from Austria’s nine regions, each offering a part. In the north tower hangs the Pummerin, a bell cast from the bronze of the Turkish cannons of 1683.

Evening – Belvedere and a coffee

6-10pm · Belvedere about €17 · Coffee €8-14

The Belvedere was built by Prince Eugene of Savoy, born in Paris, rejected by Louis XIV, and who became the greatest general of his time in Habsburg service. Inside is the world’s largest Klimt collection, including The Kiss, painted in 1908 with real gold leaf.

Then a historic coffee house, which is UNESCO heritage and not an afterthought: order a Melange or an Einspänner, the glass of water arrives on the silver tray, and you stay as long as you like.

Day 2 — Turn-of-the-century Vienna

8 km · 4 stops · 10am to 11pm · the day almost no one does, and it is the best one

Between 1890 and 1914, in a city of two million people, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner, Karl Kraus and Robert Musil all worked at the same time. Many knew each other, most detested each other, and they met in the same coffee houses. Psychoanalysis, atonal music, modern architecture and analytic philosophy were all born within a two-kilometre radius, in the same fifteen years, while the empire was dying. This day follows that story.

Morning – Kunsthistorisches Museum

10am-1pm · Ticket about €21 · Closed on Mondays at certain times of year · Metro Museumsquartier

The Kunsthistorisches was built on the Ringstraße in 1891 for a practical reason: over four centuries the Habsburgs had amassed an enormous collection and no longer knew where to put it. It is the mirror twin of the Natural History Museum facing it.

The thing that exists nowhere else: the largest collection of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, twelve paintings out of about forty surviving in the world. There is Hunters in the Snow, the Tower of Babel, the Fight Between Carnival and Lent. They hang in the same room and are alone worth the trip to Vienna.

Then Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, Raphael, Caravaggio, Velázquez, Rubens, and the Kunstkammer: the Habsburg chamber of wonders, twenty thousand objects including automata, coral, ivory, mechanical clocks, and the Cellini Salt Cellar, the only surviving goldwork certainly by Benvenuto Cellini — stolen in 2003 and found buried in a forest three years later.

If you have time or are with children: the museum’s grand staircase has spandrels painted by a very young Gustav Klimt, before the Secession, visible from a special walkway installed at certain times of year. Ask at the entrance.

Early afternoon – The Secession and Otto Wagner

2-5pm · Secession about €12 · Loos Haus free from outside · on foot

In 1897 a group of artists led by Klimt broke away from the official association of Viennese artists, which they saw as conservative, and founded the Secession. The following year they built a headquarters: a white, cubic building topped with a dome of gilded laurel leaves that Viennese immediately nicknamed «the golden cabbage». Above the entrance the motto still reads: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit — to every age its art, to art its freedom.

In the basement is Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, from 1902: thirty-four metres of painting across three walls, conceived as a temporary work for a single exhibition and saved by chance by a collector. It tells the Ninth Symphony in images and ends with a kiss.

A few steps away, two buildings that explain the architectural break of those years. Otto Wagner’s Postsparkasse, from 1906, has a façade of marble slabs fixed with visible aluminium rivets: showing the nails instead of hiding them was a statement. And the Looshaus on Michaelerplatz, from 1910, which Adolf Loos built with no ornament and no window frames, directly opposite the Hofburg: the scandal was such that the newspapers called it «the house without eyebrows», and it is said Franz Joseph avoided using that palace door to not see it. Loos had written an essay titled Ornament and Crime.

Afternoon – Freud and Hundertwasser

5-7pm · Freud Museum about €15 · Hundertwasserhaus free from outside

At Berggasse 19 is the apartment where Sigmund Freud lived and saw patients for forty-seven years, from 1891 to 1938, when he had to flee to London after the Nazi annexation. Here he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. The museum is deliberately bare: Freud took almost all the furniture with him, including the famous couch, which is in London. What remains is the original waiting room, photographs, documents, and the door with his nameplate.

Then an eighty-year jump forward, twenty minutes away: the Hundertwasserhaus, built between 1983 and 1985. Friedensreich Hundertwasser was a painter convinced that straight lines were «godless» and that modern architecture made people ill. Vienna’s city council let him design a social-housing building, and this is what came out of it: deliberately uneven floors, no two windows alike, coloured columns, and two hundred and fifty trees growing from the balconies and windows — he called them «tree tenants» and argued they had citizenship rights.

You cannot go inside, since people actually live there, but it is free to view from outside. Opposite is a shopping centre he built in the same style, which you can enter.

Evening – Grinzing and the new wine

From 7:30pm on · Free entry, you pay for what you drink · Tram 38 from Schöttentor

Vienna is the only European capital with vineyards inside its city limits: about six hundred hectares, on the northern hills. And it has an institution no other place has: the Heuriger.

In 1784 Emperor Joseph II issued a decree allowing wine growers to sell their own wine directly from home, without a licence, as long as it was that year’s vintage and any food served was also home-produced. That decree is still in force. An open Heuriger hangs a pine branch above the door: it means the new wine is ready.

You take the tram to Grinzing, Nussdorf or Neustift am Walde, sit at long tables in a courtyard under the vines, get food from a self-service counter — cold cuts, cheeses, Liptauer, bread — and drink the house wine. It is cheap, it is loud, and it is how the Viennese have spent summer evenings for two centuries. Grinzing is the most touristy; the Nussberg vineyards, just above it, have the view over the city and far fewer coaches.

Day 3 — The Danube and the Wachau

The whole day · train to Melk, one hour · then boat to Krems, or bicycle

The Wachau is the stretch of the Danube between Melk and Krems, thirty-six kilometres of narrow valley with terraced vineyards, stone villages and ruined castles. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, an hour by train from Vienna.

Melk Abbey

2 hours · Ticket about €15 · Train from Wien Westbahnhof, one hour

The Benedictine abbey of Melk stands on a crag above the river and can be seen for miles. It has stood since 1089, but what you see is the early-eighteenth-century baroque rebuild: 365 windows, a yellow façade 360 metres long, and an idea of magnificence that served a political purpose — the Catholic Counter-Reformation in territories only recently reclaimed from Protestantism.

Inside, two things: the abbey church, one of the most sumptuous baroque interiors in Europe, all gold and faux marble; and above all the library, with around a hundred thousand volumes, globes, carved wooden shelving and a frescoed ceiling. This library — and others like it in Austrian abbeys — inspired Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: the narrator-monk is named Adso of Melk.

The monks are still there, and the abbey runs a school with nine hundred students: it is not a museum, it is a living institution nearly a thousand years old.

The boat to Krems

2 hours by boat · Ticket about €30 · April to October · alternatively, cycle the bike path

From Melk you go down to the jetty and take the boat that runs the length of the valley to Krems: two hours against the current, less than that downstream. You pass beneath terraced vineyards, villages with onion-domed church towers, and castles.

Halfway along is Dürnstein, the prettiest village in the valley: coloured houses, a church with a blue bell tower, and on the crag above it the ruins of the castle where in 1192 Richard the Lionheart was held prisoner, captured on his way home from crusade by the Duke of Austria whom he had insulted in the Holy Land. He was freed after a year against a huge ransom, which the duke used to finance Vienna’s walls and found Wiener Neustadt. The legend of the minstrel Blondel who found him by singing beneath castle windows was born here.

The Wachau is also a serious wine region: it produces Grüner Veltliner and Riesling on dry-stone terraces built in the Middle Ages. The valley’s apricots, the Marillen, have protected-origin status and go into candied fruit, jams and a spirit.

Krems, at the end of the valley, has a well-preserved medieval centre, and from there the train brings you back to Vienna in an hour.

As an alternative to the boat: the Danube bike path runs through here and is flat, paved and well signposted. Rent a bike in Melk and return it in Krems, thirty-six kilometres almost entirely flat. In summer it is the best way to see the Wachau.