Michaelerplatz and the Imperial Apartments
Why is it significant?
Stand by the railing in the middle of the square and look down into the pit: stone walls, old foundations, the remains of a Roman settlement, lying a few metres below the horse-drawn carriages waiting for tourists.
Key Facts
| Place | Michaelerplatz and the Imperial Apartments |
|---|---|
| Address | Michaelerplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20800, 16.36640 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Imperial Heart: The Hofburg, the Habsburg Crypt and Six Centuries of Empire |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand by the railing in the middle of the square and look down into the pit: stone walls, old foundations, the remains of a Roman settlement, lying a few metres below the horse-drawn carriages waiting for tourists. Then raise your eyes to the great green dome of the Michaelertor, the gate of the Hofburg, and you have the whole history of this city in one glance.
The ruins belong to the civilian town that grew up outside the Roman camp of Vindobona, nearly two thousand years ago. They were excavated in the early 1990s and left open, a reminder that the emperors built on somebody else's capital. The domed wing above you is surprisingly young: it was planned in the Baroque age but completed only in the 1890s, when Franz Joseph finally gave the palace a proper front door onto the city.
Turn around and look at the plain building opposite, with its green marble columns and smooth upper floors without window frames. That is the Looshaus, finished in 1911. To the court it looked naked, a house without eyebrows, and the story goes that the old emperor disliked it so much he avoided looking out of the windows facing it. Whether or not that is true, the whole city argued about it for years.
Under the dome is the entrance to the Imperial Apartments and the Sisi Museum. Inside you can see Franz Joseph's study, where he signed documents from before dawn, and his simple iron camp bed: the emperor of fifty million people slept like a soldier. In Elisabeth's rooms stand her gymnastic bars and rings, fixed in a doorway, the private gym of a woman who wanted to escape her own palace.
Franz Joseph reigned for sixty-eight years, from 1848 until his death in 1916, in the middle of the war that ended his empire two years later. This walk began with an emperor on his knees in the Graben, and it ends with another one in a narrow soldier's bed. From here, Kohlmarkt leads straight back to the Graben, and the whole imperial city lies behind you.