Vienna Walking Tours: Self-Guided Routes Through Imperial and Musical Vienna

Vienna rewards walking because its history sits so close together. In one morning you pass from a Gothic cathedral to the winter palace of the Habsburgs, then out to a boulevard built for a new age of museums and opera.

1. In 1857 Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the old city walls torn down. In their place came the Ringstrasse, a four-kilometer boulevard lined with the Opera, the Parliament, City Hall and the great museums, all finished in a few decades.
2. Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and the Strauss family all worked within a short walk of St. Stephen's. Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro in the apartment on Domgasse that is now the Mozarthaus.
3. The coffeehouse is a daily habit, not a museum piece. Since 2011 UNESCO has listed Viennese coffeehouse culture as intangible heritage, and you can still sit for hours over one coffee and a newspaper without anyone rushing you.