Vienna Historic Centre

Vienna's historic centre encompasses the imperial Hofburg palace complex, the baroque churches and squares built under the Habsburgs, the medieval streets of the old city, and the Ringstrasse boulevard constructed between 1857 and the 1890s on the site of the city's former fortifications, forming one of the most ambitious and politically charged urban planning projects of the nineteenth century and a model that European cities imitated for decades afterward.

The Hofburg, begun in the thirteenth century as the residence of the Babenberger dukes of Austria and expanded by each successive Habsburg ruler over more than seven centuries as the family's winter residence, now contains several museums of the applied arts, the imperial apartments with their original furnishings, the Sisi apartments fitted out for Empress Elisabeth, the imperial silver collection, and the Prunksaal, the state hall of the national library designed by Fischer von Erlach in 1723, one of the most magnificent baroque interior spaces surviving anywhere.

The Ringstrasse, laid out after Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the demolition of the city's medieval walls and moat in 1857, is lined with monumental buildings in a deliberately eclectic variety of historical styles: the Kunsthistorisches Museum and its natural history counterpart, the Museumsquartier, the Parliament building in neoclassical Greek style with its porched colonnade, the Burgtheater, the Vienna State Opera, and the Votivkirche, the neo-Gothic cathedral built to celebrate the survival of Franz Joseph after an 1853 assassination attempt.

Each building on the Ringstrasse was individually commissioned as a statement of civic identity, cultural aspiration, and imperial legitimacy, and the ensemble as a whole represents Vienna at the height of its role as a European capital of government, culture, and musical life.

The Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra, occupies a purpose-built concert hall on the Ringstrasse whose Golden Hall is considered one of the world's finest acoustic spaces for orchestral music and hosts the famous New Year's Concert that has been broadcast internationally on the first of January every year since 1939.

The Naschmarkt, Vienna's principal open-air food market, has operated along the former Wien River bed through the city since at least the sixteenth century and remains a daily market where the multicultural character of the former Danube monarchy is visible in the range of spices, meats, cheeses, and produce on sale.

The Musikverein's Golden Hall, opened in 1870 and rebuilt after war damage, hosts the Vienna Philharmonic's subscription concerts and the annual New Year's Concert broadcast to ninety countries; the orchestra traces its institutional history to 1842, making it one of the oldest major orchestras in the world.

The Ringstrasse ensemble, conceived as a single planning act, represents one of the most coherent statements of nineteenth-century European civic ambition and is a direct ancestor of every city boulevard built since.

The Hofburg's state rooms and imperial apartments offer a window into seven centuries of Habsburg rule that no other single building in Europe can match.

The Musikverein and the Vienna Philharmonic together represent a continuous musical tradition stretching back to the city's eighteenth-century golden age under Maria Theresa and Joseph II.