The Habsburgs' winter residence for six centuries, now holding the Sisi Museum, the imperial silver and the crown jewels.
The Hofburg is not a building but an accumulation — wings added by successive Habsburgs from the thirteenth century to 1913, in whatever style was current, around a series of courtyards. Walking through it you pass from medieval to Renaissance to Baroque to a nineteenth-century imperial idea of itself in about four minutes.
It is still a working seat of government: the Austrian President’s offices are in the Leopoldine Wing.
What is inside
The Imperial Apartments are the state and private rooms of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth. His is an iron camp bed and a washstand; hers includes a gymnasium, because she exercised obsessively.
The Sisi Museum covers Empress Elisabeth: her hair, her dresses, her diets, her escape from court, and her assassination in Geneva in 1898 by an anarchist with a file. The museum is unusually good at puncturing the romantic version that Austrian tourism otherwise sells, and it is worth going in with low expectations and being surprised.
The Silver Collection is the imperial tableware, which is more interesting than it sounds — the logistics of feeding a court are laid out in porcelain.
The Imperial Treasury (Schatzkammer) is the best thing here and is ticketed separately. It holds the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, tenth-century, and the Holy Lance, along with the Burgundian treasure and the Order of the Golden Fleece. If you have time for one collection in the Hofburg, make it this.
The Austrian National Library’s State Hall is a Baroque room of 200,000 books under a frescoed dome, and is one of the most photographed interiors in Europe for good reason.
Also within the complex: the Spanish Riding School, the Albertina at one corner, the Papyrus Museum, and the Weltmuseum with its ethnographic collection.
Practicalities
The complex is confusing and the ticketing is worse — each collection has its own entrance and its own price, with several combination passes. Decide what you want before you arrive rather than at the ticket desk.
The courtyards and passages are public and free to walk through at any hour, and are a good shortcut across the Innere Stadt.
More Landmarks
St Stephen's Cathedral
A tiled roof of a quarter of a million glazed tiles, a tower you climb by 343 steps, and catacombs full of Habsburg organs.
Schönbrunn Palace
Fourteen hundred rooms of Habsburg summer residence, a garden you can walk for free, and the oldest zoo in the world.
The Belvedere
Two Baroque palaces on a slope, with Klimt's Kiss in the upper one and the best view of Vienna's skyline from between them.