This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kayla Sommese, a Taylor Swift fan who traveled from Los Angeles to Vienna to catch Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified her expenses.
19.07.2024 - 17:21 / lonelyplanet.com
Jul 19, 2024 • 7 min read
With a millennium-long history, Vienna boasts ruins and relics, masterpiece-stuffed museums and grand palaces.
It’s also a modern metropolis that’s consistently rated one of the world’s most liveable cities, visible throughout its gracious Bezirke (districts) and cutting-edge cultural attractions.
With an abundance of things to do in Vienna, here’s where to begin.
Gothic and glorious, iconic Stephansdom and its 136m(446ft)-high Sorth Tower loom over the central Innere Stadt. While the church is free to enter, you’ll have to pay to get a close-up look at the Gothic masterworks in the central nave. An elevator whisks you up to the 21-ton Pummerin bell in the North Tower. You can also tackle the 343 steps up to the South Tower steps for views of the colorful mosaic roof tiles and sprawling city views. You’ll have a more somber experience in the subterranean Catacombs, an ossuary for those who perished during the Plague.
A show of imperial power through architecture, this 240,000-sq-m (2,583,338-sq-ft) castle complex is where the Habsburgs stacked up their endless collections of art and artifacts. The visit begins in the Sisi Museum and Imperial Apartments, then leads through a resplendent enfilade of 17 regal rooms, finishing in the frescoed, columned Prunksaal (State Hall of the Austrian National Library). Cabinets displaying the Austrian crown jewels dazzle in the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, while the Weltmuseum teems with 250,000 anthropological objects amassed by curious royals. The castle’s most famous current residents are the majestic Lipizzaner stallions that regularly demonstrate breathtaking feats of equestrianism at the Spanish Riding School’s baroque winter arena. Feeling blinged out? Take a cultural breather in the rose-laden Volksgarten or lounge on the Burggarten’s lawns.
Planning tip: The Hofburg sits on the Ringstrasse, a grand boulevard built after the city’s fortification walls were razed in 1850. A leisurely walk or a tram ride (lines 1 or 2) will reveal some of the city’s architectural highlights, including the neo-Renaissance Staatsoper, the Greek temple–like Austrian Parliament, the neo-Gothic Rathaus (City Hall) and the Renaissance-style University of Vienna.
Two institutional treasures sit next to the Hofburg, on Maria-Theresien-Platz: a symmetrical pair of grandly domed buildings that house the Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. In these museums’ endless galleries, the collections span seven millennia. Browse meteorites and minerals; antiquities from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome; precious and peculiar art finds in the Kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities); and world-famous old-master paintings.
Just opposite, the
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kayla Sommese, a Taylor Swift fan who traveled from Los Angeles to Vienna to catch Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified her expenses.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bianca Capazorio, a 41-year-old Swiftie based in Cape Town, South Africa. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified her expenses.
Is a grand tour of Europe on your bucket list? We bet it is.
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For the first time in eight years, Bruce Springsteen and The E-Street Band are set to rock Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena on Thursday 15 and Sunday 18 August 2024, 7:30PM. Performing to a crowd of over 70,000 fans at the British Summer Time Festival in Hyde Park last month, avid fans can follow Springsteen on his U.S leg of the tour and fly direct to Pittsburgh with British Airways from £543 return.
Get ready to go long with Holland America in the Mediterranean.
Friday 19 July was set to be one of the busiest days of the summer for Europe’s airports. But the world’s biggest IT outage had other plans for hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers.
From protesters in Barcelona to large cruise ship bans and visitor taxes in Venice, the world's hottest destinations are making it clear that overtourism negatively impacts the quality of life for locals.
Jul 22, 2024 • 9 min read