Late Gothic armour is the armour people picture when they think of a knight: slim, pointed, ridged like folded cloth, the steel following the line of a fashionable body rather than hiding it. One of the finest examples anywhere stands in the Imperial Armoury in Vienna, and for…
Heldenplatz is the big open square on the Ring side of the Hofburg: lawns, two bronze horsemen, the curved front of the Neue Burg, and a long view…
The court is gone, but the places that fed it are still open. Within ten minutes' walk of the Hofburg are a confectioner that held the imperial…
Every Sunday from late September to late June, at 9:15, the Vienna Boys' Choir sings Mass in the Hofburg's own chapel. It's not a concert. It's a…
The Hofburg has no single front door. It's a block of 19 courtyards with gates on every side, and the museums inside each have their own entrance…
The Hofburg isn't a palace in the way Schönbrunn or Versailles is. Nobody designed it. It grew, wing by wing, for more than six hundred years, each…
Most visitors to the Neue Burg come for the Weltmuseum and walk past the stairs to the Imperial Armoury. That's a mistake. Upstairs is one of the…
For about three hundred years, when a Habsburg baby was christened, the water came out of this ewer and fell into this basin. Together they weigh…
Most crowns are made for a coronation. This one never saw one. Rudolf II had it made in Prague in 1602 to wear when the real imperial crown was out…
If you see one thing in the Hofburg, make it the Treasury. It's small, about twenty rooms, and it holds the objects that made a Habsburg an emperor…
