The Habsburg capital — Kaffeehäuser, concert halls, and the most civilised city in Europe
Vienna was the center of the Habsburg Empire for 600 years and the cultural capital of Europe for much of the 18th and 19th centuries — Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Schönberg, Klimt, Schiele, Freud, and Wittgenstein all worked here at the same time. The Ringstraße, a 5km ceremonial boulevard of grand neoclassical buildings constructed under Emperor Franz Joseph I in the 1860s–90s, remains the most complete example of 19th-century urban planning in the world. The Viennese coffeehouse (Kaffeehaus) is UNESCO-listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage — you order one Melange, read every newspap…
Vienna became the Habsburg dynastic seat in 1438 and capital of the Holy Roman Empire — the dynasty ruled from here until 1806 when Napoleon dissolved the Empire, whereupon the Habsburgs renamed their realm the Austrian Empire and continued. The Congress of Vienna (1814–15) after Napoleon's defeat redrew the map of Europe in Viennese ballrooms. The belle époque era under Franz Joseph I (reigned 1848–1916) produced the Ringstraße and a cultural peak; the interwar period produced 'Red Vienna,' a social-democratic experiment in municipal housing that built workers' apartments still considered am…