Vienna, Austria: Imperial City of Music, Palaces, Cafes

We’re joined by American expat resident Cherie Siebert to trace Vienna from its Habsburg-scale grandeur to its everyday pleasures. Vienna can feel like a living museum and a laid-back neighborhood on the same afternoon.

We talk through how easy it is to get around on foot and by public transportation, where palace areas like Hofburg, Schönbrunn, and the Belvedere fit into a real day, and why seasonal markets mix architecture, craft, and local tradition. 

From St Stephen’s Cathedral’s tower and crypt to the surprising places where Roman ruins appear under your feet, Vienna keeps handing you history.

Then we follow the sound. Cherie shares her favorite place to hear classical music, the Musikverein Golden Hall, plus the pull of the Vienna State Opera. As for art, the city’s deep museum bench, including Gustav Klimt’s iconic “The Kiss.” 

We also make room for the city’s hard truths, including Holocaust memorial reminders found by simply wandering the center.

To round it out, we get into Vienna coffeehouse culture, where to skip long tourist lines, why locals treat cake and coffee as a ritual, and how wine bars and nearby wine inns expand the food story. 

We also cover parks, Danube swimming spots, the Prater Ferris wheel at night, and easy day trips by train to Salzburg, the Wachau Valley, Bratislava, Budapest, and even Prague. 

If you enjoyed this, subscribe, and share the episode with a fellow traveler.

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Cherie Siebert is an expat who lives in and loves Vienna. She is a teacher, jewelry maker, traveler and life-lover. Find her at artsfish@me.com 

Podcast host Lea Lane has traveled to over 100 countries, and has written nine books, including the award-winning Places I Remember  (Kirkus Reviews star rating, and  'one of the top 100 Indie books of  the year'). She has contributed to dozens of guidebooks and has written thousands of travel articles. Read her weekly essays on Substack.
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Our award-winning travel podcast, Places I Remember with Lea Lane, has produced over 130 travel episodes! New episodes drop on the first Tuesday of the month, on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. All episodes are also on her website: placesirememberlealane.com
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Transcript

Opening Notes On Vienna

Lea Lane 0:31

The music you just heard is a waltz by Strauss, and on this episode, we'll be talking of the grand capital city on the Danube River, Vienna. Austria's largest city with a population of over two million. It's a former imperial hub of the Habsburg dynasty, and it's renowned for many things, including its classical music, heritage, coffeehouse culture, and Baroque architecture. U.S. readers of Conde Nast Traveler Magazine ranked Vienna the fifth best big city in the world and the best in Europe in the 2024 Reader's Choice Awards. And in 2025, the same magazine voted Vienna the third best city overall in Europe and gave it first place as the friendliest city in Europe. We'll be exploring Vienna with American expat resident Cherie Siebert, teacher, artist, writer, jewelry maker, wife, mom, world traveler, and lifelover. Welcome, Cherie, to Places I Remember.

From Empire To Modern City

Cherie Siebert 1:26

Oh, hello, Lea. Thank you for having me here.

Lea Lane 1:29

Well, let's start with some history. Vienna developed from early Celtic and Roman settlements into a medieval and Baroque city, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The city owes its size and much of its beauty to the legacy of the Habsburg dynasty, whose empire disintegrated after World War I. The Habsburgs ruled over large areas of Europe for many centuries. And Wien, to give the city its German name, was both their home and the administrative center for almost all that period. Can you tell us about Vienna? V

Cherie Siebert 1:59

Vienna is a very walkable city, and the public transportation is just as easy because you go on and you go off. There are no checkpoints. You need to make sure you do buy a pass, but you can really flow from one place to another. And it's not a huge city. You can go around the palace and walk around there where you have lots of shops and all the high-end shops, but also many historic places. And you will stumble upon bits of Rome, which you will see fenced off with some signage on to let you know the significance of that particular place. Even when you're inside a building, sometimes you will look down a staircase and you'll see Roman ruins preserved at the bottom of the staircase. The palace area, there's a park there where people love to lounge and to have their lunch with their pets and everything. It's close to what they call the winter gardens, which is it's a giant greenhouse. And of course, during the royal times, they had, you know, summer in the winter.

Lea Lane 3:00

Right. Is this the Hoffberg we're talking about?

Cherie Siebert 3:03

Yes.

Lea Lane 3:04

Schoenbroun is the summer residence, which is gorgeous with a huge park and zoo. But the Hoffburg has Lippazonner horses. That's where it does.

Cherie Siebert 3:13

And you can wander around the alleyways there and the tunnels and very typical Viennese streets. You will come upon where the Lipazsonners are stabled. You're just walking down the street and look to your right, and there's a bunch of Lippazoners in their stalls.

Lea Lane 3:28

White horses. Right. Sitting in the stands and watching them perform. It was very special. What about the Belvedere? That's two Baroque palaces, which is now a museum.

Cherie Siebert 3:39

It was a very elegant and wonderful place to go. And a lot of these places have markets at certain significant times of the year, like the Christmas, the Easter for the heck of it's summer market, I think. Right. They like markets. It's great to come at a time when they have those markets because you can see both things. You can see the elegance of the palaces and you can see the markets too.

Markets And Handcrafted Finds

Lea Lane 3:58

What are some handicrafts typical?

Cherie Siebert 4:00

Well, of course, it's seasonal. In the winter, you'll find Christmas ornaments, handmade things. I have bought artist prints that I have on my wall here in my home. You'll find clothing, you'll find a little bit of everything, but a lot of it will be uniquely handcrafted.

St Stephen’s Tower And Crypt

Lea Lane 4:15

Right. The traditions remain. There's some churches in Vienna that date back a thousand years, but the Gothic St. Stephen's Cathedral is special. What do you feel makes it worth a visit?

Cherie Siebert 4:27

The first thing I wanted to do was to go up the staircase to the tower, which I did. It's such an extraordinary piece of architecture, and it's amazing that it mostly escaped World War II unscathed. But to go to the top of this bell tower, if you have the quadriceps for it, is an extraordinary experience.

Lea Lane 4:47

But going down to the crypt that has a tremendous amount of history down there. That's easier.

Cherie Siebert 4:51

You usually don't need to reserve. Really quite interesting. It's like something out of a movie. There's skeletons, there's skulls. If you don't like that kind of thing, you probably don't want to go, but I loved it. It's been so long since the skeletons have been down there, but those were real people. It definitely anchors you in history. You know, a lot of us grew up in the United States where we think of history as 250 years ago. Right. But here we're in the thousands of years.

Lea Lane 5:17

You mentioned in World War II about 20% of Vienna's buildings were destroyed, but large portions of the historic center survived, including Baroque Castles and Gardens and the 19th century Ringstrasse, which is lined with grand buildings. Another thing that is interesting that reflects World War II is the Holocaust Memorial.

Cherie Siebert 5:36

You just kind of happen upon it. My husband and I went downtown with our daughter for a movie over the weekend. We didn't plan to go there, but you end up as you're winding through the city center streets, we were on what's called the Jewish street, where there used to be a lot of Jewish businesses before World War II. A very somber place as you continue to walk, as you wind around, you get into square, you're close to the memorial. This is something that is honored because, of course, you know, the history that it has. It wasn't always this way. When my husband grew up here, there were a lot of things that were just left out of the curriculum of the schools. When he came to visit me in DC years ago, we went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and there were things he learned there that he didn't know. And he went back and talked to his family about it. And as you walk through the city, you see these little brass squares that honor the people who were taken from their homes.

Lea Lane 6:32

Now, an imperial capital inevitably attracts the nobility, the aristocracy, and other wealthy residents. Musicians, architects, artists, and designers also congregate. So the arts have always been celebrated in Vienna. It is considered the home of classical music. I mean, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Brahms, Mahler, Schubert all lived and performed there. And it's from the Viennese classicism through the early part of the 20th century. We have Strauss writing waltzes, perfect to dance to. Where do Viennese listen to their great music? Where do they go?

Cherie Siebert 7:05

My very favorite place to go is the Musikverein. It was built in the late 1800s. And it has the Golden Hall, which does have amazing acoustics. But when you first walk in there, before anybody begins performing, you're just struck by the absolute beauty of it. And not in a way that is too much, too tacky, too gold, though it's the gold room. It's just elegance in its best form.

Lea Lane 7:28

What era are you looking at?

Cherie Siebert 7:31

This is about the the late 1890s.

Lea Lane 7:33

Oh that's beautiful. Yeah.

Cherie Siebert 7:35

Yeah. You have the murals, you have the chandeliers, the velvet seats. The acoustics are indeed incredible. I have seen Yo-Yo Ma perform there. I've listened to Chinese New Year's concerts, classical concerts there.

Lea Lane 7:49

Combination of art and music, just perfect. The Vienna State Opera is also one of the world's great opera houses. I remember when I visited, I did go inside and look at that, also magnificent. Now, all those empresses and emperors and ennobled people collected great art. And so the museums are filled with notable works. There's Austria's most famous artist, Gustav Klimpt, of course. Museums filled with Picasso's and Monet, the Albertina. You also can find the world's greatest Breugel collection in one of the museums there. The Belvedere has the iconic The Kiss from Klimt, right? That's a famous, famous, beautiful painting that many people seek out. There's also contemporary art and music in the museum's quartier. What are some of the contemporary things that you'd find?

Cherie Siebert 8:33

For example, Paul Klee. They have an incredible collection of modern, postmodern art in the federal museums. And the federal museums are a network. You can buy a pass if you come as a tourist. I have the year pass, and I can go and come as I please. You will find everything that you need from every period of art history, of natural history, of technology, of a little bit of everything. It's famous for the Secession period.

Parks Danube Swims And The Prater

Lea Lane 9:01

That's about the 1900s around there. Gorgeous, yeah. There are many Vienna experiences that are somewhat interesting but non-traditional. You have the bookstores like Shakespeare and Company, you have Freud's house, which I visited, and I would say his couch, his original couch is there where he would put people down. So it's very interesting to look where he would sit and psychoanalyze people right there. There's the Grabin Pedestrian Street, which has lots of interesting shops. What about parks and outdoor spaces? What do you like?

Cherie Siebert 9:37

The best parks in Vienna are the ones that I just accidentally stumble upon as I'm walking around. And they are everywhere. It's a very green city. Well, in the summer anyway. There are parks literally everywhere. You walk a little while, and if you buy your coffee, you have a place to sit down on a park bench under the trees. We live in the Floridsdorf district. So in between there, you have the Danube River, and there is an entire area there that is bike paths. It has one big long park, basically. There's parts of it that are shut off to traffic completely. There are a lot of swans. You can swim in the river. The river is very clean.

Lea Lane 10:16

Wow.

Cherie Siebert 10:16

Yeah, they have piers that you'll see people in the summer diving off the piers into the water.

Lea Lane 10:20

A city river that you can swim in. Wow.

Cherie Siebert 10:22

And also famous for is flood control. I think it was last summer when there were heavy rains all over Europe and there were other regions that were flooding. Knock on wood. There was no problem here whatsoever because that whole stretch in between where we are and the Vienna City Center was built for flood control.

Lea Lane 10:42

Wow. So they're ahead of their time there. Very, very important. I have to mention the Prata, the historic amusement park with the Ferris wheel. If anyone saw the movie The Third Man, which is a great movie with Orson Welles, it was set in that park, and that's an old movie from the 40s. It's very iconic.

Cherie Siebert 10:59

I had not seen this movie, and I had a friend visited last summer, and she sat me down in front of my sofa, and we went on and we found The Third Man and we watched it.

Lea Lane 11:08

It's a great movie, and that music, the instrument, the zither, if you've never heard of it, it's a very haunting sound, and I can't forget it ever.

Cherie Siebert 11:16

We went over there at night, and this is a great time to visit the Ferris Wheel because it is lit up beautifully. I took so many photographs that evening that came out. Well, there is a mini amusement park that looks a little bit like something out of a Stephen King movie. Good night.

Lea Lane 11:32

Ooh, okay.

Coffee Cake And Wine Culture

Cherie Siebert 11:33

They're a little bit like festive but creepy. So if you're into that, right? It kind of has The Third Man vibe.

Lea Lane 11:41

Well, let's talk food and drink. Vienna is known for Gemütlichkeit , which is a cozy, warm, sweet feeling when you go to a coffee shop or have a cake. I think that the cakes and coffee are something like the high tea in in London. These beautiful wood and marble older cafes where you go in and have you mentioned coffee. They have all different wonderful coffees. And of course, they have apple strudel and sacher tort and other great sweets. Do you indulge in this as a local or is this for tourists?

Cherie Siebert 12:10

I do, and I'm lucky in that my husband is an incredibly gifted baker. So we have this in our kitchen often. But when I do go out, I do avoid, I'm sorry, the touristy coffee houses. Where would you go? You don't need to stand in line at Cafe Mozart for two hours. I walk past there all the time and just shake my head. There are some unique and original coffee houses that are still around.

Lea Lane 12:35

Cafe Speri. Yes. Speri yes. I went there. Is that still around?

Cherie Siebert 12:40

It is. And this is the place where when my husband and I first met each other like 30 years ago, and I visited him here, he took me to Cafe Speri.

Lea Lane 12:49

Oh, I might have been there.

Cherie Siebert 12:50

I absolutely fell in love with this place. I hadn't been there for literally decades. We moved back to Austria. We were out in the remote areas of the Alps for a while. And then we had the pandemic. And a lot of these coffee houses closed during the pandemic. They went out of business with coffee. It's still here. Whenever my friends are in town, this is one of the first places we'll go to.

Lea Lane 13:18

No, but we hit the right one because that is an authentic one. And it's supposed to have a three o'clock coffee and cake. Then you don't need to eat much dinner.

Cherie Siebert 13:25

Right. And it's this kind of place where it's where the locals go. You don't really find the tourists there.

Lea Lane 13:30

I feel bad even saying this on a podcast, but No, that's why we have a podcast to give people the places to go that aren't filled with tourists.

Cherie Siebert 13:38

There's never any hurry for you to leave your table. I mean, the locals will come there with a journal and they'll sit there with their coffee and talk to their friends for an hour or two.

Lea Lane 13:47

Perfect. I will also mention wine bars because, of course, the countryside around Vienna and even in Vienna, there's great wine, white wine especially, and there are wine bars all around. So if you don't want the coffee and cake, I'm sure you can just have the wine and cheese or something of that sort.

Cherie Siebert 14:02

Yeah, I've also experienced with that because I don't really drink. During the Christmas market, you have the glug vine, the spice cider, which is mixed with wine. This is like an iconic drink.

Easy Day Trips By Train

Lea Lane 14:14

Talking about wine, you have to go outside a little bit to go to the wine inns. They have little markers on their signs when the new wine is in. It's so much fun to drive around or have someone drive you around would be even better, or take public transportation. But that's one of the great things about Vienna. It's so central. I want to mention that some of the places you can get to in a couple of hours by train or bus or car. One is Salzburg, which is one of the most beautiful towns in Austria. It's the birthplace of Mozart, it's the backdrop of The Sound of Music. There's an old town, a fortress, and gardens. That takes only a couple of hours by train. You can do that in a day.

Cherie Siebert 14:54

When we lived in the countryside, my children they have no idea how lucky they were. Their annual field trips went to places like this. So my daughter went to Salzburg twice. In year two, she's like, oh, do I have to go back to Salzburg? I'm like, what are you talking about?

Lea Lane 15:09

The Wachau Valley is another area. So UNESCO World Heritage Region is stunning Danube river landscapes, stunning medieval towns. And I went to a place called Melk, which has a great Baroque abbey. I was on a river cruise on the Danube, and we stopped specifically to see this abbey and have wine tasting at one of the taverns. It was really delightful. That again is only an hour or so outside. Another village is Hallstatt. Have you been to that? That's in the Alps where you used to live nearby, I would hope.

Cherie Siebert 15:42

I lived in Corinthia around a little tiny village called Pistendorf that had a hundred residents. A couple years later, we moved to Hamagor, which had maybe 800 residents.

Lea Lane 15:53

Small town girl.

Cherie Siebert 15:54

I can look over my shoulder, and Italy was there. So it was very close to the Italian border. That's where I was.

Lea Lane 16:00

It's very nice that it's so central because I think, as I'm mentioning, you could go to other places besides Austria. You can take an hour train to go to Bratislava in Slovakia, the capital. Very charming old town. You can take a two and a half hour train and get to Budapest and see the gorgeous Hungarian Parliament building and the fisherman's bastion. And in four hours, you can get to Prague. That's a long ride, I would say, certainly, but there it is.

Cherie Siebert 16:27

It's there for the last I heard they have night trains too from central Vienna. And my plan is I want to take the night train to Paris. If I can ever get a chance to have a few days off. The night trains are also very popular. So even though it's further, you go to sleep and you wake up there.

Expat Tips For First Timers

Lea Lane 16:43

I mean, it's perfect. Vienna to Paris. I mean, really, it sounds so delightful. Tell us a little bit. You're an expat. I mentioned that. Any tips or anything you want to tell us about your experience that might generally help?

Cherie Siebert 16:58

In Vienna, English is generally spoken. Like at first, they they may try to say, oh, they don't speak English, but everybody speaks a little bit. When you're further out of Vienna, there's less and less. So to have a little bit of German under your belt is not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. The people are very friendly. The city itself, it's not that large. As an expat or even as a tourist, somebody coming here that's doesn't know the place, the most wonderful things you will find are probably just what you will find stumbling and wandering around. I mean, a lot of the church, there are churches everywhere. There's a Greek Orthodox church that is absolutely gorgeous. We just stumbled into it one day, my husband and I, and walked inside. They're usually unlocked and open to visitors. There are groups here. If you're an expat, Facebook groups, there's an international women in Vienna, English speaking people from all over the world that, hey, where can I do this? Or I don't know how to do that. What can help? They're very, very, very helpful.

A Personal Vienna Story

Lea Lane 18:00

Yes, I think people should realize with so many people being expats, there are always groups to go to. You will meet people who speak your language. Well, the name of the podcast is Places I Remember. So, Sheree, would you please share a special memory of your city, Vienna?

Cherie Siebert 18:15

Yes, Vienna. I never expected to really end up in Vienna. It was kind of a roundabout and accidental. But I grew up in Ohio. And even though my parents were kind of adventurers from far away, my father was a reconnaissance photographer in World War II. My mother was a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol. We were in Ohio, and it was kind of boring. But my father had a subscription to National Geographic that from the time I was about seven years old, I started looking at and then eventually read cover to cover. And by the time I was graduating from high school, my goal was just to go see everything everywhere, every place.

Lea Lane 18:55

I know the feeling.

Cherie Siebert 18:57

And I loved old things, and there were no old things around me. A lot of old people, but yeah, but not, you know, we lived in a 1960s ranch house. You know, it was I love antiquities, I love art, I love classical music. And so I actually ended up where I wanted to be without even knowing how I ever got here. I am in a Viennese apartment that was built around the turn of century, about 1899. It's a little bit shabby, it's incredibly wonderful with high ceilings, three meters. And the place where I am here right now, as I'm talking to you, in 1945, when the bombing strafe came through by the Allied forces, like many apartments and buildings in Vienna was bombed away. A third of this building was gone. Where I'm sitting right now was just in air. It was just air. My father being in the it wasn't quite the United States Air Force then, it was the United States Army Air Force. He was stationed in De Bockfield in England, and he was up in the air in one of the bombers. No idea where he was, if he was close to Vienna, but just this kind of idea of this coming together of these the the past history and where I'm living right now, it gives me chills. So that's that's my story.

Final Thoughts And Farewell

Lea Lane 20:25

Yeah, it's a circle, full circle. And you wound up where you wanted to be, as you said, without realizing you'd be there. So it's a wonderful story. Well, Cherie Siebert, resident of beautiful historic artsy Vienna, thank you for sharing its classic delights and modern charms. Auf Wiedersehen and hope to see you there someday. I'd like to visit. Thank you.