Vienna 2026

We catch the early train from Brno and are in Vienna with the whole day ahead of us. First the U-Bahn out to Schönbrunn, the Habsburgs' summer palace, while the gardens are still quiet: past the Neptune Fountain and up the long slope to the Gloriette, for the view back over the palace with the city behind it. This is where a six-year-old Mozart played for Maria Theresa in 1762 and, so the story goes, climbed into her lap afterwards. Then a quick look round the Saturday flea market, with Otto Wagner's flower-tiled apartment block across the road, and a short climb into Mariahilf to the Haus des Meeres, an aquarium stacked eleven floors high inside a concrete flak tower from the war: sharks, a glass tunnel through the sea, a tropical house where birds and monkeys roam free, and the whole city spread out below from the top. Lunch is the Naschmarkt on its busiest day, eaten stall by stall as we walk. Then the Secession under its golden dome, the Karlskirche across the water at Karlsplatz, and the Opera, before we go underground into the Kapuzinergruft, where around a hundred and fifty Habsburgs lie in metal coffins that grow wilder by the century. Next comes the Prunksaal of the National Library, a baroque hall of leather-bound books under a painted dome, and a walk from Michaelerplatz, where the Hofburg's ornate gate faces Adolf Loos's scandalously plain house, down Kohlmarkt to the Graben and its plague column. We climb the 343 steps of the south tower of Stephansdom as the sun goes down, with the patterned tile roof below us and the city lights coming on. Cake in the old lanes behind the cathedral, and finally the Prater, where we take one slow turn on the Riesenrad above the lit-up city before a schnitzel dinner and the late train home.