Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Vienna is the capital of Austria, the cradle of classical music, the home of the rich Habsburg
heritage, and one of Europe's most livable cities. The city center is skyscraper-free,
pedestrian-friendly, dotted with quiet parks, and traversed by electric trams. Many buildings
still reflect 18th- and 19th-century elegance, when the city was at the forefront of the arts
and sciences. Compared with most modern European urban centers, the pace of life is slow.
Vienna (
Wien
in German—pronounced “veen”) has always been considered the east-
ernmost city of the West. For 640 years, Vienna was the capital of the enormous Austrian
Empire (a.k.a. the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a.k.a. the Habsburg Empire). Stretching from
the Alps of northern Italy to the rugged Carpathians of Romania, and from the banks of
the Danube to sunny Dubrovnik, this multiethnic empire was arguably the most powerful
European entity since Rome. And yet, of its 60 million people, only eight million were Aus-
trian; Vienna was a kind of Eastern European melting pot. Today, the truly Viennese person
is not Austrian, but a second-generation Habsburg cocktail, with grandparents from the dis-
tant corners of the old empire—Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia,
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, and Italy.
Vienna reached its peak in the 19th century. Politically, it hosted European diplomats
at the 1814 Congress of Vienna, which reaffirmed Europe's conservative monarchy after
the French Revolution and Napoleon. Vienna became one of Europe's cultural capitals,
home to groundbreaking composers (Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Strauss), scientists (Dop-
pler,Boltzmann),philosophers(Freud,Husserl,Schlick,Gödel,Steiner),architects(Wagner,
