Gold, Rebels and The Kiss: Vienna from the Secession to the Belvedere

From the golden cabbage of the Secession past Otto Wagner's sunflower pavilions and a plague-vow church to Prince Eugene's palace, where Klimt's lovers embrace and Austria won back its freedom in 1955

Vienna · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. The Secession: The Golden Cabbage

Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Wien, Austria

Stand on the pavement across the road and take in the strangest building in this part of Vienna: a white block, almost without windows, crowned by a ball of gilded leaves that glitters as if it had been dipped in honey. The Viennese took one look at it in 1898 and named it the golden cabbage. They still call it that... only now they say it with affection.

Read the gold letters above the door: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit. To every age its art, to art its freedom. That motto was a declaration of war. In 1897 a group of young painters and architects, with Gustav Klimt as their first president, walked out of the old artists' society on Karlsplatz, which they found stuffy and obsessed with selling. They called themselves the Secession, and the young architect Joseph Maria Olbrich gave them this temple within about a year.

Inside there are no velvet salons and no gilded frames, just white walls, daylight pouring from above, and rooms that could be rebuilt for every show. Within a few years this little building had shown Vienna Japanese prints, the Glasgow designers around Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the paintings of Van Gogh. And the dome is a laurel tree: some three thousand gilded leaves, the plant of Apollo, of poets and of victory.

The real treasure is downstairs. In 1902 the Secession staged an exhibition in honour of Beethoven, and Klimt painted a frieze around the walls of one room. It tells the story of humanity's longing for happiness: floating figures, a knight in golden armour, a monstrous giant with the body of an ape, and at the end a choir of angels and a couple locked in an embrace, Klimt's version of the Ode to Joy. At the opening, Gustav Mahler conducted his own arrangement of a passage from the Ninth Symphony. The frieze was meant to be destroyed after the show. Instead it was cut from the wall, sold, hidden through two wars, bought by the Austrian state in 1973 and returned here in 1986.

And here is the final twist: the rebels' temple ended up on Austrian money. Look at the 50 cent euro coin, and there is the golden cabbage. Now cross towards the open square to the east, where two little green and gold pavilions stand at the edge of Karlsplatz.
2. Otto Wagner's Karlsplatz Pavilions

Karlsplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria

In front of you stand two small buildings facing each other like twins: pale green iron frames, thin white marble slabs, and over every doorway a golden sunflower spreading its petals across the roof line. They look like jewellery boxes. In fact they were railway stations.

At the end of the nineteenth century Vienna built the Stadtbahn, a city railway that ran around the centre and along the river Wien, and the man in charge of its architecture was Otto Wagner. He designed dozens of stations, bridges and viaducts, and these two pavilions, opened in 1899, are the most famous of all. One was the entrance for trains in one direction, the other for the opposite one. In those days, by the way, the trains here were pulled by steam engines.

Look at how they are made. Wagner did not carve the walls out of stone like a palace. He built a steel skeleton and hung the marble on it in thin plates, like a coat, and he left the iron visible and painted it. His motto was that something impractical cannot be beautiful. Yet he could not resist the gold: the sunflowers, the delicate lines around the doors... That same year, 1899, the sixty-year-old professor joined the Secession you have just seen, the oldest of the rebels by far.

These pavilions very nearly vanished. When Vienna built its modern U-Bahn in the 1970s, Karlsplatz became a vast construction pit, and the old station was in the way. After public protest the pavilions were taken apart piece by piece and put back together on top of the new station. Today one of them is a small museum about Otto Wagner run by the Wien Museum, and the other has become a café.

Stand between the two for a moment. Beneath your feet three underground lines now cross, thousands of people pass every hour, and almost nobody looks up at the sunflowers. Now walk east across the square, past the grand palazzo with the arched windows that marks the corner, to the building the rebels walked out of.
3. Künstlerhaus & Albertina Modern

Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Wien, Austria

Here is the enemy. Or at least, that is how Klimt and his friends saw it in 1897. In front of you rises a dignified palace in the style of the Italian Renaissance, with arched windows, a broad staircase and the solid confidence of an institution that knows it matters.

This is the Künstlerhaus, the House of Artists, completed in 1868 for the society of Viennese painters, sculptors and architects. For thirty years it was the place an artist in Vienna had to be shown. It held the great annual exhibitions, it decided who was in and who was out, and it sold a lot of pictures. Its star in the 1870s was Hans Makart, the painter whose enormous canvases and plush studio set the taste of a whole generation, so much so that the Viennese spoke of a Makart style in furniture and even in hats.

The young Klimt was a member here, and successful. But in the 1890s the rules started to choke the younger artists: foreign modernists were kept out, juries favoured safe, saleable work, and the old guard held every key. In 1897 Klimt and his friends resigned and founded the Secession. What started as a quarrel between colleagues became one of the founding moments of modern art in Central Europe.

And history has a sense of humour. The house the rebels walked out of now belongs, in part, to the art they fought for. After a long restoration it reopened in 2020 as the Albertina Modern, a museum for art from the second half of the twentieth century to today. The grand old exhibition halls of the establishment now show the radicals of later generations.

Glance to the right before you leave. The building next door, with the terracotta coloured walls, is the Musikverein, home of the famous New Year's Concert, so on a winter evening this corner is full of people in evening dress. Now turn south across the park towards the great green dome with two columns that you cannot miss.
4. Karlskirche: An Emperor's Plague Vow

Kreuzherrengasse 1, 1040 Wien, Austria

Walk to the edge of the long pool and let the church fill your view: a Greek temple portico, a huge oval dome of green copper, and on either side a giant column covered in spiralling reliefs, like something carried off from ancient Rome. It should not work. Somehow, it does.

This church was born of fear. In 1713 the plague came back to Vienna and killed thousands. Emperor Charles VI made a vow: if the city was spared, he would build a church to Saint Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who had nursed the sick during a plague two centuries earlier. The epidemic ended, and the emperor kept his word. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach designed it, and when he died in 1723 his son Joseph Emanuel finished the work in 1737.

Now look again at those columns, because they are a political message in stone. They quote Trajan's Column in Rome, and they also recall the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar, the old symbol of the Spanish crown. Charles had fought for years to become king of Spain and lost, and here he still put the pillars on his church. The spiral reliefs tell the life of the saint, but the whole facade says: Rome, Spain, the world... all of it belongs to the house of Habsburg.

Inside, the oval dome is painted by Johann Michael Rottmayr with a swirl of saints and clouds rising towards heaven. And out here, in the water, sits something no emperor could have imagined: a bronze by the English sculptor Henry Moore, Hill Arches, placed in the pool in 1978. Smooth, organic, almost like bones polished by the sea, it is in conversation with the Baroque church behind it.

On your left is the Wien Museum, the museum of the city's own history, which reopened in December 2023 after years of rebuilding, with a new floor floating on top of its 1959 building. Among its treasures are works by Klimt and Schiele, and Klimt's portrait of Emilie Flöge, the woman at his side for most of his life. Now leave the square to the east, along the side of the park, until you hear a fountain roaring.
5. Schwarzenbergplatz: The Fountain and the Soldier

Schwarzenbergplatz, 1030 Wien, Austria

Listen first, then look. The roar comes from the Hochstrahlbrunnen, the high jet fountain, throwing water metres into the air in a wide stone basin. Behind it, on a tall column framed by a curved colonnade, a giant soldier in a golden helmet holds up a flag. Two very different stories share this square.

The fountain first. For most of its history Vienna drank bad water, from wells and the river, and cholera came back again and again. Then, in 1873, the city opened its first mountain spring pipeline, carrying water by gravity from the springs of the Rax and Schneeberg mountains more than ninety kilometres away. No pumps, just a gentle slope all the way. This fountain was switched on the same year to celebrate it. To this day, Vienna's tap water comes from the Alps, and the Viennese are very proud of it.

Locals like to say that the fountain is also a calendar, with its jets standing for the days, the hours and the months... count them if you have the patience. On summer nights it is lit in changing colours, and it is one of the coolest places in the city to sit.

Now the soldier. This is the memorial to the Red Army, unveiled in August 1945, only four months after Soviet troops took Vienna in heavy fighting in which many thousands of their soldiers died. The Russian inscription honours those who fell for the liberation of Europe from fascism. For Vienna, 1945 meant two things at once: the end of seven years of Nazi rule, and for many civilians, weeks of violence, hunger and fear. The square was even renamed Stalinplatz for ten years. Under the State Treaty of 1955, Austria promised to protect Soviet war memorials, and it still does.

So here, side by side, stand a monument to clean water and a monument to a war, and the Viennese live with both. Now walk a few steps south, along the right side of the colonnade, to the grand gate of a Baroque palace.
6. Palais Schwarzenberg: Two Architects, One Palace

Schwarzenbergplatz 9, 1030 Wien, Austria

Through the railings you can see a long Baroque front, pale and calm, curving around a courtyard, with a park stretching away behind it. It looks like one harmonious design. It is actually the work of two rival geniuses.

Around 1700, the land outside the city walls was where Vienna's aristocracy came to breathe. The Ottoman siege of 1683 was over, the danger had passed, and noble families raced each other to build summer palaces with gardens on these slopes. This one was begun for Count Heinrich Franz von Mansfeld, Prince of Fondi, by the young Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt. The count died, and in 1716 the Schwarzenbergs bought the unfinished house and handed it to Hildebrandt's great rival, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, and then to his son.

So what you are looking at is a duet between the two men who shaped Baroque Vienna. Fischer von Erlach, the scholar, who thought in Roman temples and imperial grandeur, the architect of the Karlskirche. Hildebrandt, the more playful one, who loved movement and light... and who, a few years later, would build the Belvedere next door for Prince Eugene.

The family that owns it has a strange history of fate. In 1732 Prince Adam Franz of Schwarzenberg, the man who bought this palace, was killed during a stag hunt by a stray shot... fired by Emperor Charles VI himself. And in 1810, in Paris, Princess Pauline of Schwarzenberg died in a fire that broke out during a ball at the Austrian embassy, celebrating Napoleon's marriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise. She had gone back into the flames to look for her daughter.

The palace was badly damaged by bombs in 1945 and later restored. It is still owned by the Schwarzenbergs, more than three hundred years after they bought it, and it is not open as a museum, so enjoy it from here. Now continue east along Rennweg, the old road to Hungary, to the long low palace on your right.
7. Lower Belvedere: Prince Eugene's Summer Palace

Rennweg 6, 1030 Wien, Austria

Walk through the gateway from Rennweg and you find yourself in a quiet courtyard in front of a long, low palace, only one storey high, with a raised central hall. It is surprisingly modest for the man who built it, one of the most famous soldiers in Europe.

Prince Eugene of Savoy was born in Paris in 1663, small, sickly and destined for the church. He asked Louis XIV for a commission in the French army and was turned down. So he rode to Vienna, arrived just as the Ottomans were besieging the city in 1683, and spent the next half century winning battles for the Habsburgs: Zenta, Blenheim, Belgrade. Louis XIV had made the worst personnel decision of his reign.

Eugene became immensely rich, and he spent it on art, books and buildings. Here Hildebrandt built him a summer palace between 1712 and 1716. Step inside and you will find the Marble Hall, where the ceiling celebrates the prince as a hero of the gods, and the Golden Cabinet, a small room lined with gilded panels and mirrors that multiply the light endlessly. The prince also kept a menagerie here, with exotic animals and birds, and an orangery, so oranges grew in a Viennese winter.

The Lower Belvedere also keeps a quiet treasure. The lead figures of Georg Raphael Donner's fountain on the Neuer Markt in the old town, made in the 1730s, are originals, and they are here... the ones in the city are copies. Empress Maria Theresa once wanted the naked figures taken down for being improper, and the story goes that they were saved only because the man sent to melt them refused.

Eugene never married and had no children. When he died in 1736 his niece inherited everything, sold the art, and in 1752 the Habsburgs bought the palace. Only then did people start calling it the Belvedere, the beautiful view. Now step back out to Rennweg and walk a little further east, to the church with the green dome behind a convent wall.
8. Salesianerinnenkirche: The Widowed Empress

Rennweg 10, 1030 Wien, Austria

Stop in front of the convent wall and look up at the dome rising behind it, green and solid, with a lantern on top. Most people walking to the Belvedere pass it without a glance. It belongs to a church founded by a grieving empress.

In 1711 Emperor Joseph I, only thirty-two years old, died of smallpox. His widow, Wilhelmine Amalia of Brunswick, had borne him daughters but no surviving son, and so the throne passed to his younger brother, Charles VI... the emperor of the Karlskirche. The widow stepped back from the court. She did not want a palace. She wanted a convent.

In 1717 she founded this house for the Salesian Sisters, the nuns of the Order of the Visitation, whose task was to educate girls from noble families. The church was built in the following years by the architect Donato Felice d'Allio, and the dome inside was painted by the Venetian Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. Wilhelmine Amalia lived here among the sisters, and when she died in 1742 she was buried here too, not with her husband's family.

Think about the neighbourhood she chose. On one side, the summer palace of Prince Eugene, the most glamorous house in Vienna, with its menagerie, its parties and its gardens. On the other, behind this wall, a world of silence, prayer and lessons in French and needlework. Two great Baroque projects went up side by side in the very same years, one for glory and one for retreat.

There is a quiet thread connecting them. The empress's daughter, Maria Amalia, married into the Bavarian ruling family; her other daughter married the heir to Saxony. Through those marriages, the girls educated and the vows made on this street reached into half the courts of Europe. Now turn back a few steps and pass through the garden gate of the Belvedere, where the great formal garden climbs the hill.
9. Belvedere Gardens: From the Underworld to Olympus

Prinz-Eugen-Straße 27, 1030 Wien, Austria

Walk slowly up the central axis, between the clipped hedges and the gravel paths, past the basins and the stepped cascades, towards the palace on the top of the hill. Every few steps, turn round. The view behind you is the whole point of this garden.

The garden was laid out for Prince Eugene by Dominique Girard, a Frenchman trained in the tradition of Versailles. It climbs the slope in three levels, and the classic reading is that it tells a story. The lowest part, by the Lower Belvedere, belongs to the elements and the underworld. The middle with its cascades belongs to Parnassus, the mountain of the Muses. And at the top, at the Upper Belvedere, you reach Olympus, the home of the gods, where the prince himself liked to be imagined.

Now look at the sphinxes guarding the ramps: lion bodies, women's heads, and rather knowing smiles. They stand for strength and wisdom, and Vienna's children have been climbing on them for generations, polishing their stone backs. Around them the stone figures, vases and putti once gleamed with water from the cascades, a show that cost a fortune in pipes and pumps.

Around 1760, the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto, nephew of Canaletto, stood at the top of these terraces and painted Vienna laid out below him: the garden, the domes, the spire of the Stephansdom on the horizon. That painting now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and when you reach the top, you can hold your own view up against it. The city has grown, but the spire is still there, exactly where he put it.

To the east, behind the wall, lie two more gardens you might miss: the Alpine Garden, with mountain plants, and the university's Botanical Garden. Eugene himself was a passionate collector of rare plants. Now carry on uphill to the top of the garden, and stand in front of the palace that crowns it.
10. Upper Belvedere: The Kiss and the State Treaty

Prinz-Eugen-Straße 27, 1030 Wien, Austria

In front of you the Upper Belvedere rises like a stage set: roofs that seem to ripple like a row of tents, a pond that doubles the whole facade in its water, and white stone glowing in the sun. Hildebrandt finished it for Prince Eugene in 1723, not to live in but to impress.

Inside hangs the most famous painting in Austria. Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, painted in 1907 and 1908, shows a couple wrapped in a single golden cloak, kneeling at the edge of a meadow of flowers. His robe is covered in black and white rectangles, hers in round blossoms, and real gold leaf glows on the canvas. The Austrian state bought it in 1908, almost as soon as it was exhibited, which is why it never left Vienna. The Belvedere now holds the largest collection of Klimt paintings in the world, alongside Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and a version of David's Napoleon crossing the Alps.

Not every painting stayed. Klimt's golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, seized from her Jewish family after 1938, hung here for decades. In 2006, after a long legal fight, an arbitration court ruled that it belonged to her heirs, and it left for New York. The museum now researches the history of its collection, and that story is part of Vienna's art history too.

Then go up to the Marble Hall. On the 15th of May 1955, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France signed the State Treaty here with Austria's foreign minister Leopold Figl. The occupation that had begun in 1945 would end, and Austria would be free and neutral. Figl stepped onto the balcony and held up the signed treaty to the crowd waiting in this garden, and the people below cheered.

So the same rooms hold Klimt's lovers and a nation's freedom. Before you go, turn round on the terrace and look back down the garden towards the city. For the last stop, leave by the south gate and walk down through the small Schweizergarten park to a glass pavilion that once stood in Brussels.
11. Belvedere 21: The Pavilion from Brussels

Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Wien, Austria

After the gold and marble of the Belvedere, this is a shock, and a good one: a long, flat box of steel and glass floating above the lawn, so transparent that you can see the trees through it. It looks like it belongs to another century. It does.

This building was designed by the Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer as Austria's pavilion for the World Expo of 1958 in Brussels, the fair of the Atomium. It was a small country's way of saying: we are back, modern and open, only three years after the occupation ended. The pavilion was praised, and instead of scrapping it after the fair, Austria took it apart and rebuilt it here, on the edge of the Schweizergarten.

In 1962 it opened as the Museum of the 20th Century, which the Viennese simply called the Zwanzger Haus, the Twenties House. For a city that had lost so many of its artists to exile and murder after 1938, it was a window that opened again: international modern art, new Austrian painting, sculpture and design. Generations of young Viennese saw their first truly contemporary art inside this glass box.

Then the museum moved its main collection elsewhere and the pavilion stood half forgotten for years. After a renovation it reopened in 2011 as the 21er Haus, and in 2018 it took its present name, Belvedere 21, now dedicated to Austrian art from the twentieth century to today. So the walk ends where it began: with artists who refuse to look backwards. The Secession said, to every age its art. This pavilion is that motto, made of glass.

Look around you one last time. Behind you, Prince Eugene's palace of 1723. In front of you, the new towers of the district around the main railway station, Vienna's newest neighbourhood. Between them, three hundred years of the city's taste, from Baroque heroes to Klimt's gold to steel and glass. The main station is a short walk to the south... and the trams to the centre run just outside.