Vienna for The Curious Wanderers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend
Gilt, gloom, and coffee that takes all afternoon.
No theme, just the city at its best. The sights that earn their reputation, a workshop or a market, one strange place nobody told you about, and dinner where the food is the point.
Friday: Bones under the square
- Stephansdom catacombs
The last tour of the day: copper urns holding Habsburg entrails, the bishops' crypt, and the plague pits where the bones were stacked by convicts.
- Globe Museum and Esperanto Museum
The world's only globe museum, Mercator's 1541 terrestrial sphere, and upstairs the museum of a language invented to end war.
- Gasthaus Wolf
A Wieden Beisl with its own butcher's instincts, Beuschel and Blunzngröstl on the card and the cooks' friends at the next table.
Saturday: Porcelain and Ottakring
- Brunnenmarkt and Yppenplatz
The longest street market in the city, Turkish and Balkan grocers, then coffee on Yppenplatz where the Saturday farmers' stalls set up.
- Augarten porcelain manufactory
Europe's second-oldest porcelain works, founded 1718, in the baroque Augarten; the tour passes the painters' benches where the Wiener Rose is still done by hand.
- Zur Herknerin
Stefanie Herkner's small Wiedner room, home cooking from her father's old Beisl: Krautfleckerl, Grammelknödel and whatever the week brought.
Sunday: Wax, the sewer, and a hidden courtyard
- Narrenturm
Joseph II's 1784 round tower of fools, now the pathological-anatomical collection: wax moulages, skeletons and the cells with their iron rings.
- Third Man sewer tour
Down into the Wienfluss culvert where Carol Reed shot Harry Lime's flight, with the city's sewer workers as guides.
- Silberwirt
Hidden in the Schlossquadrat courtyards of Margareten, a Beisl since 1821 with dark wood, a garden and a Zwiebelrostbraten cooked without irony.
Monday: Hats and open sandwiches
- Dorotheum
The auction house founded 1707, viewing rooms open and free; the Biedermeier furniture and Jugendstil silver tell you what Vienna made and what it keeps.
- Mühlbauer
Fourth-generation hatmakers since 1903, blocked felt and straw from their Floridsdorf workshop; have a hat fitted and shaped while you wait.
- Trześniewski
Open sandwiches since 1902, egg and paprika, herring and onion, with a Pfiff of beer at the counter, then the airport.