The Hofburg in plain English: the Habsburg palace in Vienna and its sister in Innsbruck, their history, collections and rooms
Most visitors walk past it. The Augustinian Church is built into the Hofburg on Josefsplatz, next to the State Hall of the library, and from the outside it's a plain Gothic front squeezed between palace wings. It was the Habsburg court's parish church from 1634 to 1918, and it's…
Plenty of palaces have a library. The Hofburg has a library hall nearly 80 metres long, all shelving, galleries and painted ceiling, built so an…
Heldenplatz is the big open square on the Ring side of the Hofburg: lawns, two bronze horsemen, the curved front of the Neue Burg, and a long view…
The court is gone, but the places that fed it are still open. Within ten minutes' walk of the Hofburg are a confectioner that held the imperial…
Every Sunday from late September to late June, at 9:15, the Vienna Boys' Choir sings Mass in the Hofburg's own chapel. It's not a concert. It's a…
The Hofburg has no single front door. It's a block of 19 courtyards with gates on every side, and the museums inside each have their own entrance…
The Hofburg isn't a palace in the way Schönbrunn or Versailles is. Nobody designed it. It grew, wing by wing, for more than six hundred years, each…
If you see one thing in the Hofburg, make it the Treasury. It's small, about twenty rooms, and it holds the objects that made a Habsburg an emperor…
Vienna's Hofburg gets the crowds, but the Habsburgs had a second Hofburg in Innsbruck, and it holds one of the saddest stories in the family. It's…
When Austria swears in a new government, the ceremony takes place in a Rococo room in the Hofburg called the Maria Theresa Room. It was once the…
