Vienna

About Vienna

By Martina - "The first time, I thought: princely, regal, everything ordered and on time. Almost too much. Me, who loves graffiti covered walls, plaster crumbling onto the ground, brutal cities, what am I doing here? Heart of the Habsburg Empire, between the 1700s and 1800s it turned power into architecture: palaces, grand perspectival axes, museums that still define it today. The historic center is dominated by the Hofburg, by the gothic Stephansdom cathedral, and by a surreal whirlwind of museums: the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Belvedere, the Albertina. An overload of art with few rivals. Vienna is distant, rigid, with an impenetrable kind of beauty. Silent, everything seems to happen without you even noticing. Maybe nothing happens, or everything happens at once. Then I discovered that the real Vienna starts outside the center. Water pipes running mid air. The metro is often old trams. Vintage signs and outrageous color palettes on ultra modern buildings. Otto Wagner and the Vienna Secession broke with classical aesthetics, opening the way to a new, urban visual language. Viennese brutalism, concrete that's functional and stripped of ornament. One of my favorites: Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who refuses the straight line and reimagines the city as a living organism. Discover the Spittelau Waste Incineration Plant, a power station turned into urban art, and the Hundertwasserhaus, where architecture becomes almost an inhabited forest. I used to think you couldn't fall in love with a power plant. Turns out you can. In the cafés you can stay an entire day reading and listening to music, and no one will ever ask you to leave. This is intellectual Vienna: Café Central, which recalls the city of Freud, and the Zentralfriedhof, where the musical heritage jumps between Beethoven, Schubert, and Strauss. I walk around, spying on the doorbells, golden nameplates reading Dr. followed by names I can't pronounce. Music everywhere, posters for techno and hard rock shows. Apparat is playing here at the end of January 2026, and I stole the poster, which now greets me from my living room wall. I leave the urban tangle behind and climb the hills at the city's edge, where you'll find the vineyards of Grinzing and the Wienerwald: here the Danube meets wine culture, and the Heurigen, the new wine taverns, are one of the most authentic ways to watch the city at sunset. But you can't live on art and vineyards alone, sometimes you've got to eat: Wiener Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, apple strudel, Sachertorte. And the gelato, from Tichy. For those who'd rather skip the museums, there are the markets: the Naschmarkt, spices, cheeses, Balkan, Turkish, Asian street food, all mixed in with bistros and little restaurants where bourgeois Vienna finally gets its hands dirty. More authentic, the Karmelitermarkt in Leopoldstadt: smaller, more local, Austrian producers, bakeries, small wine shops. The Brunnenmarkt, one of the longest markets in Europe, with strong Turkish and Balkan influences, an authentic, multicultural atmosphere. Maybe the most real of them all. There are Christmas markets too, but to me they're like Birkenstocks with socks. You won't find them here, go look somewhere else. And Vienna at night? Let's go dancing, we need it. The electronic scene is one of the most interesting in Central Europe: Grelle Forelle and Pratersauna take you from the hardest techno to the most experimental sound. In this princely city there's a rave culture that pushes out toward industrial and open air spaces along the Danube, not what you'd expect. In summer, electronic music meets the open air format across multiple stages, warehouses and semi legal spaces turning into ramshackle dancefloors. A bit of a clandestine city. It presents itself as modest, and instead reveals itself as incredibly beautiful and a bt slutty. Wandering around, I found a stunning sauna, wooden rooms one after another, steam and the smell of wood. Balm for a battered heart like mine. You go in naked: there must have been about fifteen of us. I undressed without feeling any eyes on me. Usually we undress to be looked at, found out, touched, that time, no. Walking naked through the hot, scalding rooms, then the icy pool full of bubbles outside, in the middle of the snow. The night sky cold, pensive, luminous. Soft skin, young and firm, asses and tits and cocks. Beautiful, ugly, it didn't matter. When it's all together like that, everything loses its identity. When you're naked among everyone and no one, you shake part of your life off your shoulders and leave the useless weight in the closet. A feeling that doesn't last long, freedom on your skin, but for an hour it was intensely reckless. Vienna hides a vibrant, dark personality, one you can only discover by living it for a long time, I think. But it seems to me a good place to lose yourself even for just a weekend, where you can order a negroni at 1pm and live a life that isn't necessarily your own. Cities that rise inside or in the middle of water are always something else. For couples, families, lifelong groups of friends, slow travelers, lovers of art and poetry colliding with the heavy and the raw. For those who like lying on the grass drinking beer by the Danube, or losing themselves in a rave night. For those with a double soul, ready to explore it. For those who ask themselves, what am I doing here? And then let themselves be swept away by the splendor."

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