The Albertina and the Bastion Terrace
Why is it significant?
Climb onto the high terrace in front of the palace and turn around: the Opera is in front of you, the roofs of the Ring beyond it, and under your feet is not a pavement but a fortification. This terrace is one of the last pieces of the bastions that once wrapped the whole inner city.
Key Facts
| Place | The Albertina and the Bastion Terrace |
|---|---|
| Address | Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20430, 16.36890 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Imperial Heart: The Hofburg, the Habsburg Crypt and Six Centuries of Empire |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb onto the high terrace in front of the palace and turn around: the Opera is in front of you, the roofs of the Ring beyond it, and under your feet is not a pavement but a fortification. This terrace is one of the last pieces of the bastions that once wrapped the whole inner city.
The palace behind you belonged to Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, and his story is a rare one in this family: a love match. Maria Theresa married off almost all her daughters for politics, Marie Antoinette to France among them. But her favourite, Maria Christina, was allowed to marry the man she wanted, Albert, a younger son with little money. The empress gave them a fortune to make up for it.
Albert spent much of it on paper. From 1776 he built up a collection of drawings and prints that today counts tens of thousands of drawings and around a million prints. Its most famous treasure is a small watercolour by Albrecht Dürer of a young hare, painted in 1502, every hair of its fur done one by one. It is so sensitive to light that the original is only shown now and then; most of the time a copy sits in its place.
Look down at the square below the terrace. On this spot stood a large apartment building, the Philipphof, and in March 1945 a bomb brought it down onto its air-raid cellar. Hundreds of people were sheltering inside, and many were never recovered. The stark monument against war and fascism by Alfred Hrdlicka, unveiled in 1988, stands here for that reason, and the bronze figure of a Jewish man forced to scrub the street remembers what Viennese crowds did to their neighbours in 1938.
So the terrace holds both faces of the city: a duke's tender collection, and the memory of its worst years, a few metres apart. Now walk along the terrace and down the ramp into the garden behind the Hofburg, where the emperors once grew their palms.