A Baroque church with two Trajan-style columns and, for now, a lift that puts you within touching distance of the dome fresco.
Charles VI vowed a church during the plague of 1713 and got Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, the greatest Austrian Baroque architect, to build it. It went up between 1716 and 1737 and is unlike anything else in the city.
The front is a deliberate collage of references: a Greek temple portico, a dome on a drum, two flanking towers, and — the strange part — two enormous columns modelled on Trajan’s Column in Rome, spiralling with reliefs of the life of St Charles Borromeo. Fischer von Erlach was making an argument that the Habsburg emperor was heir to Rome, Solomon and Constantine all at once, and he made it in stone rather than in words.
Inside
The interior is an oval under the dome, bright and comparatively restrained after the front. The dome fresco by Johann Michael Rottmayr shows the intercession of St Charles Borromeo, with Luther’s Bible being cast into the fire by an angel in one corner — the Counter-Reformation stated plainly.
The lift
For many years a passenger lift has stood inside the church, installed for restoration and kept for visitors, rising to a platform just under the dome. From it you are close enough to see brushwork, and a further stair goes up to the lantern and a small external view over Karlsplatz.
This is genuinely rare — frescoes of this kind are designed to be seen from forty metres below and almost never can be seen from anywhere else. It is also the main reason the church charges admission. The lift has been removed for periods when work finished and reinstated since; check before you plan around it.
Outside
The pool in front, with a reclining Henry Moore sculpture, is a 1970s addition and much better than that sounds. Karlsplatz itself is a confusing multi-level junction rather than a square, but the Otto Wagner Pavilions on the north side — two small green-and-gold Jugendstil stations of 1899 — are worth crossing to see, and one houses a small museum.
The Christmas market held here in December is one of the better ones in the city, with craft rather than tat.
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 Hofburg
The Habsburgs' winter residence for six centuries, now holding the Sisi Museum, the imperial silver and the crown jewels.