Travel and Tourism in Austria

Vienna in Depth: The Imperial Capital and the World's Most Livable City

Vienna has been ranked the most livable city in the world more often than any other city on earth, a designation earned through a combination of extraordinary public transportation, low crime rates, excellent healthcare and education, remarkable cultural institutions, green public spaces of unusual quality and accessibility, and an urban quality of life that combines the grandeur of a great imperial capital with the intimacy and functionality of a well-managed modern city. Walking through Vienna, one is constantly struck by the ease with which the extraordinarily grand and the intimately human coexist. The Ringstrasse, that boulevard of imperial ambition, is also a place where Viennese dog walkers stroll in the morning and children cycle in the afternoon. The coffee houses where Mozart's contemporaries and Freud's patients sat are still open and still serving their marble-table contemplative function to the working Viennese.

The Ringstrasse itself deserves extended attention as a single coherent work of urban planning of astonishing ambition. Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the demolition of Vienna's medieval fortifications in 1857 and their replacement with a broad ring boulevard lined with public buildings of cultural and civic significance. The boulevard that resulted, completed over the following three decades, contains the Vienna State Opera in neo-Renaissance style, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Naturhistorisches Museum facing each other across the Maria-Theresien-Platz in Italian Renaissance style, the Austrian Parliament building in Greek Revival style with its famous Athena fountain, the Vienna City Hall in Flemish Gothic style, and the Burgtheater in neo-Baroque style. Each building was designed in a different historical style as a deliberate act of architectural eclecticism that simultaneously demonstrated Vienna's claim to the entire cultural heritage of Western civilization. The result is arguably the most impressive boulevard in the world, a continuous sequence of architectural masterpieces that stretches for roughly five kilometers and can be traversed in an afternoon on foot or at a more leisurely pace by tram.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Art History Museum on the Ringstrasse, houses one of the great art collections in the world. Built to house the Habsburg imperial collections, it contains paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, including the largest single collection of Bruegel paintings anywhere in the world, as well as works by Raphael, Titian, Velazquez, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Rubens, Durer, Rembrandt, and virtually every other major European master. The gem collection and coin cabinet are among the finest of their type, and the Egyptian and Near Eastern collection contains artifacts of extraordinary importance. The building itself, designed by Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer with a magnificent staircase hall decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt among others, is a work of art that would be worth visiting even if the walls were bare. Fortunately they are not bare, and the experience of walking through the Kunsthistorisches Museum on a rainy afternoon in Vienna, moving from Bruegel's seasonal peasant scenes to Velazquez's royal portraits to Vermeer's luminous domestic interiors, is one of the great museum experiences available anywhere on earth.

The Naturhistorisches Museum, the Natural History Museum, faces the Kunsthistorisches across the square and is its architectural twin. It contains the Venus of Willendorf, that extraordinary 25,000-year-old limestone figurine, in a small display case that seems almost inappropriately modest for an object of such significance. The museum also contains a comprehensive collection of minerals, meteorites, fossils, and natural history specimens, as well as a remarkable anthropological collection that provides essential context for understanding the deep history of the region.

Schonbrunn Palace, the Habsburg summer residence, is Austria's most visited attraction and for good reason. The palace itself, painted in the distinctive "Schonbrunn yellow" that has become one of the signature colors of Vienna, contains 1,441 rooms of which approximately forty are open to visitors on the Grand Tour. The state rooms, with their gilded and frescoed ceilings, their parquet floors of inlaid exotic woods, their rococo furniture and Habsburg family portraits, give a vivid sense of the world of Maria Theresa and her successors. The Great Gallery, where grand court receptions were held, stretches for forty-three meters and is among the finest secular Baroque interiors in Europe. Napoleon I used Schonbrunn as his headquarters during the occupation of Vienna in 1805 and 1809, and the room he slept in is preserved essentially as he left it. The young Franz Joseph lived at Schonbrunn from childhood until his death, and the palace bears the marks of his long residence in the study where he worked and the bedroom where he died.

The palace gardens at Schonbrunn extend for nearly two kilometers from the palace facade to the Gloriette, a colonnaded hilltop pavilion that commands a superb panoramic view over the gardens, the palace, and the city of Vienna beyond. The Gloriette was built by Nikolaus Pacassi in 1775 to commemorate the Austrian victory at the Battle of Kolin and serves today as a coffee house where visitors can take refreshment while enjoying the view. The formal parterre gardens in the French style are geometrically perfect, the fountain pool in the center of the parterre is large enough to reflect the palace facade, and the maze near the palace entrance has been entertaining visitors since the eighteenth century. The Schonbrunn Zoo, the oldest continuously operating zoo in the world, was founded in 1752 when Emperor Franz I established a menagerie for Maria Theresa and is still operating today, now as a modern conservation zoo with a strong emphasis on breeding programs for endangered species.

The Belvedere Palace complex, built for Prince Eugene of Savoy between 1714 and 1723 and now housing Austria's most important collection of Austrian art, consists of two palaces connected by formal baroque gardens on the slope of land east of the old city. The Upper Belvedere, the grander of the two palaces, contains the permanent collection of the Osterreichische Galerie, which houses the largest collection of works by Gustav Klimt in the world, including The Kiss, the Judith paintings, and several important landscapes. The Kiss, painted between 1907 and 1908, shows a couple locked in an embrace, their bodies and clothing covered in geometric gold-leaf patterns that are simultaneously decorative and symbolic, with the man's rectangular patterns suggesting the angular world of thought and ambition and the woman's circular patterns suggesting the natural world and fertility. The painting is an icon of European Modernism and is reproduced on everything from posters to coffee mugs to chocolate boxes throughout Austria, yet seeing the original in person, its gold leaf still glowing after more than a century, remains a genuinely moving experience.

The Hofburg Palace complex, the Habsburg winter residence in the heart of the first district, is not a single palace but an agglomeration of palaces, wings, courtyards, chapels, libraries, museums, and riding schools built over six centuries and sprawling across an enormous footprint in the center of the city. The Kaiserappartements, the Imperial Apartments, can be visited as part of a combined ticket with the Sisi Museum, which is dedicated to the personality and life of the Empress Elisabeth with a depth and nuance that goes considerably beyond the romanticized image projected by Romy Schneider in the famous Sisi film trilogy of the 1950s. The Imperial Silver Collection in the same complex is a staggering accumulation of court tableware, from massive silver table centerpieces to the complete porcelain and glassware services used for great state banquets.

The Spanish Riding School, housed in the Winter Riding School designed by Fischer von Erlach within the Hofburg complex, is one of the most extraordinary living traditions in the world. The Lipizzaner horses, white stallions bred at the Lipica stud farm in what is now Slovenia, are trained over a period of years to perform the haute ecole movements of classical dressage, including the famous capriole, in which the horse leaps into the air and kicks out with its hind legs while suspended. Performances at the Spanish Riding School are sold out weeks and months in advance and are genuinely remarkable to watch, the horses and riders moving with a precision and elegance that is the product of years of daily training and centuries of accumulated knowledge. The morning training sessions, which are open to the public at reduced cost, offer an equally rewarding opportunity to watch the horses work at closer quarters and with greater frequency of movement.

St. Stephen's Cathedral, the Stephansdom, rising from the heart of the pedestrian zone at the center of old Vienna, is the religious and spiritual heart of the city and one of the great Gothic cathedrals of central Europe. Its distinctive multicolored tile roof, its soaring south tower reaching 136 meters, and its ornately carved portals make it instantly recognizable from anywhere in the first district. The interior contains the elaborate tomb of the Emperor Frederick III and numerous other royal monuments, but it is perhaps the catacombs beneath the cathedral that leave the most lasting impression on visitors. The catacombs contain, among other things, the bones of tens of thousands of plague victims who died during the Black Death and subsequent epidemics and were buried in mass graves beneath and around the cathedral, their remains subsequently excavated and stacked in the catacombs in the arrangements typical of ossuaries. It is a sobering reminder of the mortality that lay beneath the surface of even the most magnificent imperial city.

The Naschmarkt, Vienna's central outdoor market, stretches for nearly two kilometers along the bed of the covered Vienna River between the Karlsplatz and the Kettenbruckengasse, and on any weekday it is one of the most vivid and sensually overwhelming urban experiences in the city. Two rows of market stalls face each other across a wide central aisle, selling produce, fish, meat, cheeses, olives, pickles, dried fruits, nuts, spices, and a vast range of international foods reflecting Vienna's cosmopolitan population. Restaurants, cafes, and sausage stands intersperse the market stalls, and the whole complex fills with shoppers, tourists, students, and elderly Viennese from early morning until the stalls close in the late afternoon. On Saturdays the market is joined by a large flea market that stretches back from the end of the food market, selling everything from genuine antiques to pure junk with the random abundance characteristic of great flea markets everywhere.

The Prater, the vast public park east of the city center, contains the Riesenrad, the Giant Ferris Wheel that has been a symbol of Vienna since its construction in 1897. The Riesenrad was immortalized in the opening scene of The Third Man, in which Orson Welles, as the mysterious Harry Lime, rides the wheel with Joseph Cotten and delivers one of the most famous monologues in cinema history, looking down at the tiny figures below and asking what a few dots mean if one of them stops moving. The wheel itself is a genuine Victorian engineering achievement, its red cabins moving slowly around in a full circle that offers views over the Prater, the Danube, and the Vienna skyline on clear days. The Prater park surrounding the Riesenrad is immense, encompassing formal gardens, woodland walks, cycling paths, and an amusement park, and serves as the green lung of the eastern inner city.

The Hundertwasserhaus in the third district is one of Vienna's most unusual and most photographed buildings, a social housing block designed by the painter and architectural theorist Friedensreich Hundertwasser and completed in 1986. Hundertwasser, who believed passionately that straight lines were godless and inhuman, created a building in which virtually no two windows are the same size or shape, the facade is decorated with multicolored tiles and has trees growing from inside the building through holes in the walls, the floors are deliberately uneven, and every surface is shaped and colored with organic exuberance. The building remains occupied social housing and the interior is not open to visitors, but the exterior can be viewed from the street and the adjacent Hundertwasser Museum in a converted warehouse across the road contains a comprehensive collection of Hundertwasser's paintings, prints, and architectural designs.

The Viennese coffee house tradition deserves special attention as a cultural institution of unique importance. Vienna's great coffee houses, which include the Cafe Central in the Herrengasse, the Cafe Landtmann on the Ring, the Cafe Schwarzenberg, the Cafe Hawelka in the old city, and dozens of others, are not simply restaurants or cafes in the ordinary sense but rather social institutions with their own rules, their own atmosphere, and their own history. The tradition was established in Vienna in the late seventeenth century, around the time of the Battle of Vienna in 1683, when, according to popular legend, bags of coffee beans left behind by the retreating Ottoman army introduced the beverage to the city. Whether or not the legend is accurate, coffee houses spread rapidly through Vienna in the eighteenth century and became the primary social meeting places of the educated bourgeoisie.

What makes the Viennese coffee house unique is the unspoken social contract that governs the relationship between customer and establishment. A customer who orders a single coffee is entitled to sit at their table for as long as they wish, read the newspapers that are provided on wooden holders, write, think, talk, or simply observe the world passing, without being hurried or pressured to order anything more. Waiters in the classic houses wear black waistcoats and long white aprons and carry their silver trays with an air of dignified indifference that is, in its own way, a performance of considerable sophistication. The coffee itself comes in multiple varieties: the Melange, which is roughly half coffee and half steamed milk foam and is the most quintessentially Viennese of all; the Kleiner Schwarzer, a small black espresso; the Grosser Brauner, a large coffee with a small jug of cream; the Einspanner, a single espresso served in a tall glass with whipped cream on top, traditionally drunk by cab drivers who needed to hold their reins with one hand; and the Fiaker, coffee with a shot of plum schnapps, named for the Viennese horse cab. A glass of water accompanies every coffee order as a matter of course, and the water is refreshed as often as the guest drinks it. UNESCO inscribed the Viennese coffee house culture on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2011.

The MuseumsQuartier, occupying the former imperial stables in the seventh district, is one of the largest cultural complexes in the world, covering approximately 60,000 square meters and containing an eclectic mix of museums, art institutions, outdoor spaces, and eating establishments. The Leopold Museum houses the world's largest collection of works by Egon Schiele, the expressionist painter who was Klimt's most important protege and who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918 at the age of twenty-eight. Schiele's raw, angular, psychologically intense figure paintings challenged Viennese society's comfortable self-image and have never lost their power to disturb and move. The MUMOK, the Museum of Modern Art, contains an important collection of twentieth and twenty-first century international art. The Architekturzentrum Wien focuses on architecture and urban design. In summer, the courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier becomes one of Vienna's most popular outdoor gathering places, with large foam deck chairs installed among the baroque architecture for visitors who want to sit, read, people-watch, or simply enjoy the unusual juxtaposition of imperial architecture and contemporary cultural life.

The Vienna Philharmonic, founded in 1842, is widely regarded as one of the two or three finest orchestras in the world. It is unique among the world's major orchestras in that it is self-governing, with no permanent conductor, choosing instead to invite the world's greatest conductors for specific programs and seasons. This arrangement has allowed it to maintain a distinctive and consistent Viennese sound, a warm, rich orchestral tone particularly notable in the strings and woodwinds, that is immediately recognizable and that generations of conductors from Brahms to von Karajan to Ozawa have sought to preserve rather than override. The orchestra performs in the Musikverein's Golden Hall, completed in 1870 and widely regarded as having the finest concert hall acoustics in the world, a reputation based on the hall's particular combination of dimensions, wall decorations, and materials that produce a sound that is warm, clear, and spacious simultaneously. The Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert, broadcast live to more than ninety countries with an audience estimated at several million viewers, is the most watched classical music event in the world and an institution of such consistent quality and charm that it has become a genuinely global tradition.

The Sigmund Freud Museum at Berggasse 19 in the ninth district occupies the apartment and consulting rooms where Freud lived and worked from 1891 until his forced emigration to London in 1938 following the Anschluss. The museum has been reconstructed with care and contains Freud's waiting room with its original furniture, his consulting room with the famous couch covered in Oriental rugs and cushions where patients lay to free-associate, his medical instruments, his collection of antiquities, and an extensive archive of photographs, letters, and manuscripts. Visiting the museum is one of the strangest and most affecting experiences available in Vienna, because Freud was not only the most consequential psychologist in history but a man whose ideas have so thoroughly penetrated the Western cultural landscape that it is almost impossible to think about dreams, the unconscious, childhood development, sexuality, or the relationship between memory and identity without using concepts he named and shaped. Standing in the consulting room where the unconscious was, in a sense, discovered, produces a peculiar frisson that is part historical awe and part something harder to name.

Salzburg: Mozart's City and the Baroque Masterpiece

Salzburg is the fourth largest city in Austria, with a population of around 160,000, but its cultural and touristic significance is so disproportionate to its size that it functions as a world-class destination in a way that cities ten times larger might envy. The city is the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the setting of much of The Sound of Music, the location of the Salzburg Festival, and the possessor of a baroque old town of extraordinary architectural coherence and beauty that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It sits at the foot of the Hohensalzburg Fortress on one side and the Kapuzinerberg hill on the other, with the Salzach River running between the old town and the new, and the whole ensemble of church towers, castle battlements, and baroque facades framed by the Austrian Alps rising dramatically in every direction.

The Mozarts Geburtshaus, Mozart's birthplace, at Getreidegasse 9 in the heart of the old town pedestrian zone, is the most visited attraction in Salzburg and one of the most visited in all of Austria. The narrow, colorful Getreidegasse, with its wrought-iron guild signs hanging above the shops, is itself one of the most photographed streets in Austria, and the crowds pressing toward the Mozart house on busy summer days can be formidable. The museum inside, spread across several floors of the building where Mozart was born and lived until 1773, contains original instruments, family portraits, letters, and a comprehensive account of Mozart's early life and the environment in which his genius developed. There is something genuinely moving about standing in the room where Mozart was born, even through the considerable thickness of tourist infrastructure that surrounds it.

Hohensalzburg Castle, the fortress that dominates the skyline of Salzburg from its commanding position on the Festungsberg, is the largest fully preserved medieval castle in Central Europe. Construction began in 1077 on the orders of Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg during the Investiture Controversy, the great power struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, and the castle was subsequently expanded and reinforced over the following six centuries until it reached its present massive form. The castle was never taken by force, serving as an effective deterrent to all would-be attackers, and consequently it is uniquely well preserved compared to the many castles that were damaged or rebuilt after siege warfare. The interior contains the state rooms of the prince-archbishops who ruled Salzburg as a virtually independent ecclesiastical state for centuries, including the remarkable Princes' Hall with its original furnishings and the large ceramic stove that heated the chambers, and from the battlements the panoramic view over the city, the Salzach Valley, and the surrounding Alps is one of the finest in Austria.

Mirabell Palace and its gardens, on the right bank of the Salzach, were built in 1606 by Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau for his mistress Salome Alt, with whom he had fifteen children in flagrant defiance of ecclesiastical celibacy rules, and were subsequently rebuilt and expanded by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt in the early eighteenth century. The palace gardens, laid out in formal geometric patterns with mythological statuary, perfectly clipped box hedges, and ranks of flowers in season, served as one of the filming locations for The Sound of Music, where the scene of Maria and the Von Trapp children performing Do-Re-Mi was filmed around the garden's fountain and ornamental hedges. This connection, which the Salzburg tourist establishment understandably emphasizes at every opportunity, brings busloads of American tourists to stand in the spot where Julie Andrews danced and to recreate photographs from the film with varying degrees of success.

Hellbrunn Palace, built by Archbishop Marcus Sitticus in 1612 as a summer residence and entertainment complex roughly four kilometers south of the city center, is one of the most unusual palaces in Europe and one of the most entertaining to visit. Archbishop Sitticus, a man of considerable wealth and apparently irrepressible fondness for practical jokes, commissioned the designer Santino Solari to create an elaborate system of trick fountains throughout the palace gardens that could be activated to drench unsuspecting guests sitting on stone chairs at an outdoor dining table, walking along garden paths, or admiring the grottos and water theaters. The trick fountains, which still operate as they have for more than four hundred years, continue to soak visitors who stand in the wrong places, providing one of those moments of genuine surprise and hilarity that are rare in tourist attractions of any kind.

The Salzburg Festival, held annually in July and August, is the most important classical music and opera festival in the world. Founded in 1920 by the conductor Richard Strauss, the theater director Max Reinhardt, and the playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the festival was conceived as a response to the catastrophe of the First World War and the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, an assertion that the cultural heritage of the German-speaking world would outlast the political order that had produced it. The Festival's signature production is Jedermann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal's adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman, which is performed every year on the steps of the Salzburg Cathedral in the open air, a tradition that has continued almost without interruption since 1920. The Festival also presents a program of operas, orchestral concerts, chamber music, and theatrical productions of the highest quality, drawing conductors, directors, singers, and instrumentalists of world renown. Herbert von Karajan, who was born in Salzburg in 1908 and conducted at the Festival from 1948 until shortly before his death in 1989, was the dominant artistic personality of the Festival for four decades and shaped it into the institution it is today. Tickets for popular Festival productions sell out months in advance at prices that reflect the event's prestige.

The Mozart Kugeln, the chocolate confection that serves as Salzburg's most beloved edible souvenir, was invented in 1890 by the confectioner Paul Furst. The original consists of a center of pistachio marzipan surrounded by a layer of dark nougat and coated in dark chocolate, and the original Furst shop on Brodgasse still produces them by hand and wraps them in silver foil. Numerous commercial producers make machine-produced versions under similar names, and the question of which is the "original" has provoked debates of almost Sachertorte intensity among Salzburg confectionery enthusiasts. The authentic hand-made Furst version is distinctly superior to the commercial alternatives and worth seeking out.

The 12 UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Austria

Austria has 12 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a concentration that reflects the country's extraordinary depth of cultural and natural heritage. The Historic Centre of Vienna, inscribed in 2001, encompasses the old town of the imperial capital with its Hofburg Palace, St. Stephen's Cathedral, and the Ringstrasse boulevard, representing one of the finest ensembles of imperial urban architecture in the world. The Palace and Gardens of Schonbrunn, inscribed in 1996, recognizes the Habsburg summer residence as an outstanding example of a Baroque imperial ensemble with an 18th-century park and palace of exceptional significance.

The Historic Centre of Salzburg, inscribed in 1996, protects the baroque old town of Mozart's birthplace with its extraordinary concentration of ecclesiastical and secular baroque architecture, the Hohensalzburg Castle, and the Mirabell Palace and Gardens. The Hallstatt-Dachstein Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape, also inscribed in 1997, encompasses the prehistoric salt mines of Hallstatt, the village itself, and the surrounding mountain landscape, recognizing both the cultural and natural significance of this region of ancient Celtic civilization.

The Semmeringbahn, the Semmering Railway, inscribed in 1998, was the first mountain railway in the world built with a steam locomotive and is an outstanding example of 19th-century railway engineering, cutting through the Semmering mountain pass between Vienna and Graz through a landscape of dramatic viaducts and tunnels. The Wachau Cultural Landscape, inscribed in 2000, recognizes the exceptional stretch of the Danube between Melk and Krems as an outstanding example of a riverine landscape in which natural beauty and human cultural achievement exist in extraordinary harmony, with its terraced vineyards, baroque monasteries, and medieval castle ruins.

The Historic Centre of Graz, including Schloss Eggenberg, inscribed in 1999 and extended in 2010, protects the remarkably well-preserved medieval and Renaissance city center of Austria's second largest city, with its particular quality of a multi-cultural meeting point where Italian, Central European, and Balkan influences came together over centuries to create a distinctive urban environment. The Fertö-Neusiedlersee Cultural Landscape, a transboundary World Heritage Site shared with Hungary and inscribed in 2001, protects the unique ecosystem of the Neusiedlersee and the Fertö Lake, a shallow steppe lake of outstanding natural importance as a bird habitat and a cultural landscape of settlements, vineyards, and traditional architecture stretching back thousands of years.

The Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, a serial transnational property inscribed in 2011 and shared with five other Alpine countries, includes sites in Austria as part of a broader recognition of the remarkable prehistoric settlements built on piles in and around the Alpine lakes during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, a tradition of lake-dwelling that left behind an archaeological record of extraordinary completeness thanks to the waterlogged preservation conditions. The prehistoric rock art in the Styrian karst landscape represents another layer of Austria's astonishing depth of prehistoric cultural heritage.

Together these 12 sites represent a comprehensive portrait of Austria's natural and cultural significance, from the deep prehistory of the salt mines and the pile dwellings to the architectural achievements of the baroque and the engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century railway age.

Graz: Styria's Urban Treasure and a City Reborn

Graz, the capital of Styria and Austria's second largest city, is often overlooked by travelers hurrying between Vienna and Salzburg, an oversight that the city's inhabitants consider their loss but that the city itself manages to bear with equanimity. Graz is a genuinely beautiful and livable city with a historic center of exceptional quality, a thriving university culture, excellent food and wine, and a personality that is distinctly its own rather than a provincial echo of Vienna. The city's old town, which stretches from the Schlossberg hill above the River Mur through a maze of medieval and Renaissance streets and courtyards to the elegant baroque and Biedermeier buildings of the outer districts, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999, a recognition that confirmed what residents have always known.

The Schlossberg, the rocky hill that rises thirty meters above the old town in the center of the city, was once the site of a formidable fortress that was demolished by Napoleon's forces in 1809 as a condition of the peace treaty following his victory at Wagram, leaving behind only the Clock Tower, the Glockenturm, and a section of battlements. The Clock Tower, dating from the sixteenth century and marking the highest point of the Schlossberg, has become the symbol of Graz, its face visible from throughout the city and its presence a constant reminder of the city's layered history. The Schlossberg is now a public park with cafes, an open-air theater, and panoramic views over the red-tiled roofs of the old town and the surrounding Styrian landscape, and can be reached by funicular, lift, or a long flight of stone stairs built into the cliff face.

Schloss Eggenberg, on the western edge of Graz and incorporated into the World Heritage designation in 2010, is a remarkable palace of the early seventeenth century built by the powerful Eggenberg family in a symbolic architectural program that expresses the passage of time through numbers: 365 windows for the days of the year, 24 state rooms for the hours of the day, and four corner towers for the seasons. The interior contains a series of state rooms decorated with elaborate frescoes and rich furnishings, and the palace grounds include a beautifully preserved baroque garden that is home to peacocks and to an unusual archaeological museum displaying finds from Eggenberg's Styrian territories.

Graz is also the city that claims Arnold Schwarzenegger most directly, as the municipal boundaries of greater Graz include the village of Thal where he was born, and the city has named its main sports stadium after him despite a brief episode in which his name was removed from the stadium due to disagreements over the death penalty during his tenure as California Governor, before being restored after the dispute was resolved. Schwarzenegger's relationship with his hometown is warm and financially generous, and his donations to the local community include substantial support for cultural and educational projects.

Linz: From Industrial City to Cultural Capital

Linz, the capital of Upper Austria and the country's third largest city, has undergone one of the most remarkable urban cultural transformations in Austria over the past three decades. The city was historically an important industrial center, with steelmaking and chemicals at its economic core, and during the Nazi period it held particular significance as Hitler's chosen city for cultural and architectural aggrandizement, the place where he planned to build the Führermuseum to house the world's greatest art collection, assembled by appropriation and theft from across occupied Europe. The liberation of this particular legacy, which left Linz with the uncomfortable distinction of being the city most associated in Hitler's own mind with his Austrian identity, has been one of the city's long-term cultural projects.

The contemporary Linz has addressed its past and its industrial present with considerable intelligence and creativity. The Ars Electronica Center, founded in 1979 as an annual festival of art, technology, and society and now a permanent institution with a striking riverside building, has established Linz as one of the global centers for the intersection of artistic practice and digital technology. The Lentos Kunstmuseum, opened in 2003 in a building of translucent glass that glows blue at night on the banks of the Danube, contains an important collection of twentieth and twenty-first century Austrian and international art. The Brucknerhaus concert hall, home to the Linz Bruckner Orchestra and the annual Brucknerfest, honors the memory of Anton Bruckner, the great Romantic symphonist who was born in the village of Ansfelden near Linz in 1824 and whose massive, spiritually intense symphonies are among the most powerful works in the orchestral canon.

Austrian Christmas and Festival Traditions

The Austrian year is structured by a series of traditional celebrations that have been maintained with remarkable tenacity despite the standardizing pressures of global consumer culture. The Advent season, the four weeks before Christmas, is in Austria genuinely the most atmospheric time of year in the cities and towns. Christmas markets open across the country in late November, filling public squares with wooden stalls selling mulled wine, roasted chestnuts, handmade ornaments, candles, gingerbread, and the elaborate Christmas decorations for which Austrian craftspeople have been renowned for centuries. The Vienna Christmas Market on the Rathausplatz, with the illuminated Gothic City Hall as its backdrop, is one of the most photographed winter scenes in Europe.

The feast of Nikolo on December 6 brings Saint Nicholas, in his bishop's robes and mitre, to visit children accompanied by Krampus, his dark counterpart. Krampus, a demonic figure covered in matted fur, with horns, a long tongue, and chains with bells, represents the punitive side of the Christmas tradition, threatening naughty children with beatings from his birch switches or worse fates. The Krampusnacht on December 5, when young men in Krampus costumes roam the streets of Austrian towns and villages rattling chains and frightening passers-by, is a genuinely dramatic folk tradition that has survived and indeed flourished, with Krampus imagery now a popular cultural export appearing on greeting cards and in contemporary art.

The Fasching, the Austrian Carnival season that runs from the sixth of January through Shrove Tuesday, is the season of the great Viennese balls. Vienna holds more than 450 formal balls each season, organized by every conceivable professional group, guild, and association from the Opera Ball to the Coffeehouse Owners Ball to the Chimney Sweeps Ball, each one a formal occasion of dancing, socializing, and the careful maintenance of the Viennese tradition of elegant public ceremony. The Vienna Opera Ball, held in late January or early February at the State Opera, is the most famous and most photographed of all, transforming the opera house's parterre into a dance floor and drawing a glittering roster of Austrian society, visiting celebrities, and international media.