Vienna

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Stephansdom 1,500 points

  Everybody on the square looks up at the tower. Look at the roof instead: 230,000 glazed tiles laid into a pattern. The only way to see it properly is from a lane at some distance, not from directly underneath. Walk the far side of the block.

• Albertina 500 points

  From Albertinaplatz you are looking at a wall covered in stone figures with a house sitting on top of it. Take the ramp. The terrace up there is the flattest, quietest spot on this level, and it costs nothing to stand on.

• Hofburg 500 points

  This one is not a stop, it is a route. The level has street names that are just parts of this one building: Michaelertor, In der Burg, Schweizerhof, Burgtor. Go in under one arch and keep walking until you come out under another. Nobody will stop you.

• Kaisergruft 500 points

  What you see from the lane is a Capuchin church front with no decoration on it at all, and a door at pavement height. The door goes down. Everything worth having here is under the paving, which is where I keep mine.

• Ruprechtskirche 500 points

  Two of this level's street names point at it and one of them is a staircase. Take the Ruprechtsstiege. It is the least of the sights on this walk and the easiest to miss, sitting on the lip of the terrace where the pavement falls away past it.

• Spanische Hofreitschule 500 points

  Two of the street names on this level belong to it: Reitschulgasse, and Stallburggasse for the stalls round the corner. From outside there is not much to look at, a long wall and a gate. Go early. What you cannot see, you can hear.

• Freyung 250 points

  Do not come in off the road. Take the Ferstelpassage in from Herrengasse instead: shops, a kink, a six-sided court under a glass roof. Then the open space arrives all at once, which is how a square ought to be handed over.

• Hohe Brücke 250 points

  You will cross this without noticing there was anything to cross, because from up top it looks as though the lane simply goes on. Find the steps at either end, go down, and turn round. From down there it stops being a lane.

• Kabarett Simpl 250 points

  You will go past this one twice before you find it. There is nothing on the outside: a door in a row of doors, out in the eastern lanes. What happens in there happens in the evening, and none of it is for looking at.

• Ministerienbrunnen 250 points

  The eastern end of the level, out on the wide ring road where the lanes give up. There are two of them, one to each side of the doorway, and they are the only reason to walk this far east. Go out, look, come back. The lanes are better and they know it.

• Ringturm 250 points

  The northern tip of the level. Where the Ring runs into the quay it never had a proper ending, so somebody put one there: 23 storeys of it. You can spot this from six lanes away, which makes it the only honest signpost on the whole walk.

• Schwarzenberg 250 points

  The far south-east corner, where the level runs out onto the wide road. It is the one halt on this walk with chairs in it, and the chairs are the point. I have never sat down and I am not starting now.

• Theseustempel 250 points

  You come out of the lanes onto open grass at the western edge of this level, and there it is on the lawn with its columns, looking like it was delivered to the wrong address. It is empty. What it was made for left in 1890 and lives on a museum staircase across the road.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Dry footing, high enough. The Old Town sits on a terrace that steps down from the hills towards the Danube, and where the terrace ends it does not slope away, it drops. The Romans put a camp on that edge, because the Danube was the outer limit of the empire and a limit wants watching. Medieval Vienna then began as a slight rise on the slope above the southern arm of the river, inside the camp the Romans had left behind. The drops are all still here. On this level some of them are dealt with by stairs.

Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

97-430

Rome. From 97 this was a legion station, and for a bit over three centuries whoever gave orders here answered to a frontier command. Then the frontier stopped being one. By about 430 the military administration had come apart, and in the excavations the collapsed barracks are covered by a layer with nothing in it.

Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

976-1246

The Babenbergs, a family that governed Austria from 976 to 1246 and was town lord here. In 1155 they moved their residence out of Regensburg and into this town, building a palace for the duke and his wife on the square this level still calls Am Hof; the year after that, the march became a duchy. In 1221 they gave Vienna its oldest town charter. By about 1280 the palace had stopped being a residence and the square had started being a market, which is the right direction for a building to travel.

Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

1278-1918

The Habsburgs. The city archive dates their era here to 1278 until 1918, which is six hundred and forty years under one family, and I respect a number like that. Vienna got its first recorded mayor in 1282 and its own cross on its own shield at roughly the same time. Both came out of a stretch when the men claiming the country were too busy with each other to mind the town.

Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

1920-

Vienna itself. On 10 November 1920 the city became a federal province in its own right: the council sat as a provincial parliament and the mayor doubled as governor. The property settlement with Lower Austria followed on 29 December 1921 and took effect with the new year. Twice between 1934 and 1945 that was taken away, and twice it came back. So after Rome, the margraves, the dukes and the emperors, the question of who runs this place is finally answered inside it.

Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The outline you are walking is Roman. The camp wall was solidly enough made that it outlasted Rome and served as the wall ring of the first medieval town, which is why on the east, south and west sides its shape is still readable in the inner city. The curve of the Rabensteig follows the rounded north-east corner of it. In the Naglergasse the medieval wall ran along the even-numbered row of houses. Inside it, though, every medieval building line departs from the Roman ones. The wall stayed and everything in it was rearranged.

   Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

2. One of the widest streets on this level is a hole. The Graben is the ditch of the Roman camp: at the end of the twelfth century it was filled in, levelled and built over, paid for out of the ransom handed over for an English king. In 1294 it appears in the records as a thoroughfare, in 1300 as a market place. Then the goods arrived. Milk from 1300, cabbage from 1320, bread stalls from 1338, women selling greens from 1418. A ditch that turned into a grocer's. Nobody in this city has ever done better with a hole.

   Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

3. Before Maria Theresa's house numbers arrived in 1771, a Viennese house was identified by its sign, and a good many of those signs ended up on the street plates you walk past. Drachengasse is there because of a house called Zum goldenen Drachen. Stoß im Himmel has carried the name of a house sign since 1796. On the Wollzeile a colonial-goods dealer hung out a wrought-iron creature, half lindworm and half crocodile, called the Schmeckende Wurm, because schmecken then meant to smell; there is a courtyard on this level named after it. And the Steindlgasse is named after a sign called Zum Steindl, the little stone. I take that one personally.

   Sources: www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at, www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 239streets
• 2,774dots
• 43.3km of street
• 55.2km on foot
• 15.8hours at a stroll