Vienna wears 2,000 years inside one square kilometre: a legionary fortress buried under a market square, a Gothic spire over the medieval town, 150 Habsburgs in tin coffins, and the balcony where 1938 arrived. Three days follow that layering in order.
Consecrated 1147 on Romanesque foundations; the 137m south tower took 74 years to finish in 1433. The catacombs below hold roughly 11,000 plague dead and copper urns with Habsburg viscera. Nave opens 06:00.
Under the square lie excavated officers' houses of Vindobona, the legionary fortress where Marcus Aurelius is said to have died in 180 AD. Three floors show tribune quarters, hypocaust heating and Roman tombstones.
Parish church of the imperial court, begun around 1220 opposite the Hofburg gate. Guided crypt tours descend past some 4,000 burials, including naturally mummified 17th- and 18th-century Viennese still in wigs and burial dress.
Rachel Whiteread's concrete library memorial stands over the excavated Or-Sarua synagogue, destroyed in the 1421 Vienna Gezera. Five minutes north, ivy-covered Ruprechtskirche keeps the city's oldest nave, around 1130.
Habsburg winter residence from 1279 to 1918. Twenty-four rooms hold Franz Joseph's iron camp bed and Elisabeth's gymnastic rings, plus the Silver Chamber's 140-piece Milanese table centrepiece, thirty metres long.
The half-built remnant of Franz Joseph's Imperial Forum, abandoned in 1918. Here 200,000 Viennese cheered Hitler's annexation speech from the Neue Burg balcony on 15 March 1938. Prince Eugene and Archduke Charles ride in bronze.
Beneath the Capuchin church since 1633: 150 Habsburgs in tin coffins, from Maria Theresa's vast rococo double sarcophagus to Franz Joseph flanked by Elisabeth and Crown Prince Rudolf. Otto von Habsburg was interred in 2011.
Red Vienna's 1,100-metre superblock, built 1927-1930 by Karl Ehn for 5,000 tenants with laundries, clinics and kindergartens. In February 1934 the Schutzbund held it against government artillery; scars remain on the ochre facade.
Freud lived and practised here from 1891 until fleeing the Gestapo in June 1938, taking the furniture to London. The museum deliberately keeps the consulting rooms empty, showing the waiting room, his hat and cane, and his antiquities lists.
Leopoldstadt was the Mazzesinsel, Vienna's Jewish quarter, until 1938. Two concrete flak towers built 1944-45 still stand in the Augarten, too solid to demolish, while brass Stolpersteine around Karmelitermarkt name deported residents.
Austria's military museum in the 1856 Arsenal fortress. Its centrepiece is the bloodstained tunic and the Gräf & Stift double phaeton in which Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, plus captured Ottoman siege tents.
Opened 1876 under neo-Gothic vaults, the coffee house where Trotsky played chess, Peter Altenberg had his post delivered, and Loos, Kraus and Schnitzler argued at marble tables. A papier-mâché Altenberg still sits by the door.