Vienna's 1900 moment left the city stacked with evidence: Klimt's gold panels, Loos's stripped façades, twelve Bruegels under one roof, and concert halls where standing room still costs less than lunch. Three days through the museums, salons and cemeteries where it happened.
Prince Eugene's 1723 summer palace holds the world's largest Klimt collection — The Kiss and Judith hang alongside Schiele and Kokoschka. Opens 09:00 daily; Carlone's ceiling frescoes deserve as much attention as the paintings.
Adolf Loos's 1911 Goldman & Salatsch building faced the Hofburg with bare plaster and no window mouldings — Franz Joseph reportedly kept his palace curtains shut. The green Cipollino marble ground floor is a bank, free on weekdays.
Rudolf Leopold's 5,000-piece hoard: the deepest Egon Schiele holding on earth, Klimt's Death and Life, and Wiener Werkstätte design. Open daily 10:00–18:00 inside the MuseumsQuartier's white shell-limestone cube.
Habsburg state rooms above, 1.5 million prints below — Dürer's Young Hare rotates in and out of light-sensitive display. The Batliner collection runs Monet to Picasso permanently. Late opening Wednesdays and Fridays until 21:00.
Built in 1891 to house Habsburg collecting: twelve Bruegels, more than anywhere on earth, Vermeer's Art of Painting, and Klimt's early spandrel paintings above the main staircase. Opens 10:00, Thursdays until 21:00.
Trotsky, Loos, Altenberg and Zweig all worked in this 1876 vaulted hall in Palais Ferstel; Altenberg used it as his postal address. Order a Melange, take a newspaper off the wooden holder, and nobody hurries you out.
Six floors in Archduke Charles's palace, where Otto Nicolai founded the Vienna Philharmonic in 1842. One room reconstructs sound heard in the womb; upstairs you conduct a video orchestra that stops playing if your beat collapses.
The 1870 shoebox hall — 1,744 seats and acoustics nobody has managed to replicate. Standing places are sold at the Karlsplatz box office on the day, and the queue on Bösendorferstraße forms well before curtain.
One arc holds Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Johann Strauss and a Mozart cenotaph; behind them stands Max Hegele's 1911 Jugendstil Karl-Borromäus-Kirche. Roughly 2.5 million graves spread over 2.4 square kilometres.
The 2nd district's neighbourhood market in the old Jewish quarter: cheese at Kaas am Markt, Saturday farmers' stalls, cafés spilling onto the square. Around it sit kosher bakeries, the Karmeliterkirche and galleries in converted shopfronts.
Hundertwasser rebuilt a Thonet furniture factory in 1991 with an uneven floor he called a melody to the feet, tree tenants growing out of the windows and no straight lines anywhere. Two floors of his work, two of photography. Open daily 10:00–18:00.
Loos's 1908 bar is 27 square metres of mahogany, onyx and green marble, with mirrors angled to fake infinite depth. The interior is a protected monument, the cocktails are classic, and there is no menu theatre.