Vienna

The route runs between two baroque palaces and a ring road. Schönbrunn, begun by Fischer von Erlach in 1695 and rebuilt from 1743 under Maria Theresa, and the Belvedere, raised by Hildebrandt between 1712 and 1723 for Prince Eugene, hold the ends; between them the Hofburg, the Ringstrasse buildings and the theatres.

The Hofburg is not a palace but eleven wings grown together over roughly 300,000 square metres: a thirteenth-century core, first recorded in 1279, then some 640 years of Habsburg residence to 1918, and the president's office since 1946. The Ring exists because Franz Joseph ordered the city walls pulled down on 20 December 1857; it opened on 1 May 1865, 5.2 kilometres long and 57 metres wide. The historic centre has been a World Heritage site since 2001 and on the danger list since 2017.

At Domgasse 5 Mozart wrote Figaro between 1784 and 1787; on 8 December 1791 he was buried at the St Marx cemetery in a common grave whose exact place nobody knows. On Schwarzenbergplatz a monument unveiled on 19 August 1945 marks the roughly 17,000 Red Army soldiers killed in the battle for Vienna. Four white columns trace the ground plan of the Leopoldstädter Tempel, built by Ludwig Förster from 1854 to 1858.