Visit Vienna Guide & Vienna Tourism
Visit Vienna Guide & Vienna Tourism
Vienna Guides & Vienna Attractions
Guide to Vienna, Austria
Vienna is the glorious legacy of the Habsburg dynasty, which controlled Europe for over 600 years.
The old city on the Danube has assumed new aspects, as always.
It ‘became again “in” after being “In and Out” for so many centuries. Tradition, culture and vitality to form a surprising mixture.
Its incomparable wealth of historical treasures, artistic production, as well as a renewed and vital cultural environment, make it one of the most beloved and frequented tourist destinations.
Vienna in the end has always been so, old and new, and the provincial capital of the world. Giacomo Casanova, once said, “Everything in Vienna – he wrote after having risked arrest for indecent exposure – it was nice and there was a lot of money and luxury, but there were major hindrance for those who were devoted to Venus. A legion of vile spies, decorated with the beautiful name of Commissioners of chastity, they were ruthless killers of all the girls happy.”
In the era of greatest glory, when Francis Joseph, “Cecco Beppe”, in his stubborn and obstinate conservatism, he enjoyed a reputation as unedifying as a man totally devoid of imagination, multiethnic Vienna was full of artists, writers, musicians whose work overall formed a model and a reference to world culture. The monumental aspect of the city boundary in the Ring was monolithic, compact and quiet.
Nothing seemed to escape a mild harmony even though the waltz, despite its seemingly austere pattern cheerful, could take paroxysmal rhythms of mayhem. Arthur Schnitzler, wandering in the night encountering scary figures who lived a secret city and Sigmund Freud was rummaging in the depths of the human psyche. Those who visited Vienna, at that time as in previous ones, could only sing its praises. It was a strange and contradictory conservative progressivism, which often gave way to mysticism.
Café Central - Vienna decline was an agony, which is engaged in telling the pens of the best years of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, who lived like the famous Café Central, where at a table, even today, there is always the poet Peter Altenberg, transformed in dummy with the newspaper open in his hands, or where Trotsky once before the “Revolution” played cards. Among others, he had not even a house, the customer was more assiduous than he had in his pocket for a shilling. And, to symbolize the spirit of epic wonder if anyone bothered to offer him a job refused, saying he could not care for nothing but to complete its life. Mountains of pages and titles of this era of drift, where he tried to discern a meaning that was not there.
St. Stephen’s Cathedral - ViennaIl golden age of Vienna as a cultural capital of Europe was at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of the majestic architecture you see today are the result of the efforts of Emperor Francis Joseph I, who had enough funds to realize its ambitious plan to build a city that reflects the power of the Habsburgs. He tore down some fortifications and courtyards for the tutorials, now useless, surrounding the Innere Stadt and laid out the Ringstrasse between 1858 and 1865. In the following decade began building the most majestic buildings that overlook the street.
Most of the sights of Vienna are within the Ring, in the central Innere Stadt called. Outstanding is the Cathedral of Santo Stefano dei Pagani with the Romanesque towers, the Gothic Südturm (South Tower) measures 136 me the magnificent glazed tile roof. The catacombs of the cathedral are home to an ossuary which contains the remains of many victims of the plague.
Hofburg – Vienna Hofburg (Imperial Palace), located nearby, was the royal residence of the Habsburgs and is a monumental testimony of cultural and historical heritage. It includes the Augustinian Church of the fourteenth century, the opulent Imperial Apartments with fantastic collections of silver and porcelain, the Court Chapel (which is held every Sunday Mass sung by the choir of the Vienna Boys Choir), the imperial treasury (which also includes relics religious including one of the nails of the Crucifixion and Christ’s crown of thorns), the National Library, the baroque Prunksaal and fascinating collection of old musical instruments.
The Sigmund Freud Museum is located in the apartments where the founder of psychoanalysis lived and worked and we still have the original furniture, as well as documents, photographs and other items including the curious terracotta male genitalia.
So Vienna is one of those cities, and as all monuments universal seems eternal now. Like all things eternal seems like a thought of love.
