Hofburg Imperial Palace

For over six centuries, this was the nerve centre of one of history's most powerful dynasties. The Hofburg started as a modest 13th-century castle and never really stopped growing — today it sprawls across 240,000 square metres with 18 wings, 19 courtyards, and 2,600 rooms. Nearly 5,000 people still live and work here, including the President of Austria, who keeps an office in the Leopoldine Wing and presumably gets lost on the way to the bathroom.

The Swiss Gate, built in 1552 by Pietro Ferabosco, is one of Vienna's few surviving Renaissance monuments. Its name only dates from the time of Maria Theresa, when Swiss Guards were posted to protect the imperial quarters. Walk through it and you'll find the Imperial Treasury, home to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire — a thousand-year-old octagonal gold crown studded with precious stones that was considered so sacred it was hidden in a wall during World War II.

The Sisi Museum occupies the rooms where Empress Elisabeth lived during her increasingly rare stays in Vienna. The woman who became one of the most mythologised royals in history spent most of her marriage trying to escape the suffocating Habsburg court — riding horses obsessively, travelling compulsively, and maintaining a waist measurement of roughly 50 centimetres through extreme dieting and exercise that would worry a modern doctor.

The palace's Imperial Silver Collection contains 7,000 pieces — enough porcelain, crystal, and silverware to set a table for several hundred guests, which the Habsburgs did regularly. One of the most telling exhibits is the twenty-metre-long banquet table, permanently laid as if the emperor might walk in at any moment. In a way, the whole Hofburg feels like that: set for a party that ended in 1918 but that nobody has fully cleared away.