Vienna I

On Sunday, a driver picked us up from our apartment in Prague and ferried us three hours down the road to Vienna, Austria.

Yesterday, we woke up early for a walking tour of the city of Vienna. Our first stop was the Belvedere, a sprawling eighteenth-century palace complex overlooking the city.

The palace was built on the orders of Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was born into the French royal family but defected from France to lead the armies of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. The complex consists of two grand Baroque palaces, connected by sprawling formal gardens. The palace, despite its enormous size and prime location, was never the prince's actual residence; it was only used to host parties and entertain important guests.

We then took a tram down the hill from the Belvedere to the Ringstraße, a grand boulevard that encircles the center of Vienna lined with an array of grand civic and institutional buildings.

The Burgtheater, built in 1888, is the most prestigious and influential theater in the German-speaking world.

This soaring Gothic construction is the Viennese Town Hall. In the summer months, a large marketplace sprawls at its base, with many small restaurants and eateries, as well as live music and movie showings.

The Volksgarten, or People's Garden, is a large park located along the Ringstraße. It is famous for its hundreds of rose bushes, some of which are over a century old, as well as its replica Ancient Greek temple, built in the Doric style to commemorate Greece's independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821.

Hofburg Palace, originally built in 1278, is the former imperial residence of the Habsburg dynasty. By placing relatives of the Habsburg emperor on the thrones of various European kingdoms, the House of Habsburg was able to maintain effective control over huge swaths of Europe for over six centuries.

The Habsburgs ruled from Hofburg Palace until 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was defeated in the First World War and the monarchy was abolished. Today, the immense palace serves as the residence and workplace of the President of Austria.

After visiting the palace, we left the Ringstraße and walked along the Graben, Vienna's principal shopping street. The street is built atop the remains of the city's original fortification walls, which were built by the Romans; today, it is lined with ornate buildings in the Baroque and Art Nouveau styles, most of which date to the late nineteenth century.

This building, built to serve as the European headquarters of the New York-based Equitable Life Insurance Company, combines Old World flourishes with modern construction techniques inspired by the then-pioneering high-rises of Chicago.

Vienna's population boomed in the late 1800s, as actors, musicians, artists, architects, and other intellectuals flocked to the cosmopolitan capital in droves. During this period, Vienna was the epicenter of new ideas in politics, science, and art, and many influential figures of the twentieth century, including Sigmund Freud, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Josip Broz Tito, lived within a few blocks of each other.

Vienna was also an early center of Modernism, a radical movement in art and architecture that would become a dominant force in the mid-twentieth century. The Looshaus, designed in 1909 by pioneering architect Adolf Loos, is one of the first examples of the clean simplicity that would come to define Modernist architecture.

We ended our tour at Stephansplatz, home to St. Stephen's Cathedral. When this Gothic church was completed in 1160, it was the tallest building in the world; it remains one of the world's tallest religious structures. The designers of the church were concerned that snow accumulation on the roof could cause the building to collapse; to prevent this, the church was built with a distinctive tiled roof with an extremely steep slope.

Later that night, we returned to the summer market at the Town Hall for dinner, where we ate from a Korean street food stall before walking home along the Ringstraße under the moonlight.

Today, we will visit the Museum of Art History before watching a live symphonic performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.