Vienna and the Art of Wandering: Caryatids, Clocks, Churches and Cinemas

Oh, Vienna

The music is weaving

Haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling

This means [far from] nothing to me

Without a fixed itinerary between the two Eurovision shows (read more here on why I was in Vienna) I decided simply to wander. Occasionally, when my feet objected, I jumped on a tram, which glide through the city with a calm efficiency that somehow feels entirely in keeping with the architecture around them. And what architecture.

For a bit of fun I have grouped what caught my attention into four categories, all beginning with C: caryatids, clocks, churches and cinemas.

The caryatids and atlases came first. Figures carved into façades everywhere, holding up balconies, doorways and entire buildings with expressions ranging from serene to quietly exhausted. Once I started noticing them, I saw them constantly. Vienna’s buildings are theatrical!

For the clocks category, admittedly it was dominated by one entry: the Ankeruhr, which became the focus of an hour’s amble across the city. But what an entry. Monumental, ornate and gloriously eccentric, spanning the passage between buildings with figures processing across it hour by hour. Even better, it reveals itself on two sides. I first encountered it from the plainer side by accident before properly registering quite how elaborate it was from the other.

Then there were the churches.

Votive Church, with its impressive neo-Gothic twin towers linked by the infinity symbol and, inside, dramatic brightly coloured stained glass and intricate carving. St. Michael's Church, by contrast, has a simple pale façade yet inside revealed one of the most beautiful church organs I have ever seen, with the bonus of being there while someone was having an organ lesson. St. Stephen's Cathedral dominates the city centre both geographically and psychologically, and has also appeared in the Ultravox Vienna music video among other screen appearances. I will have to return another time to go inside properly. St Charles Church, perhaps the most visually striking of all, is currently being renovated, one tower restored while the other remains under scaffolding. When I return, hopefully it will be completed and I must book a ticket for one of the concerts held there.

Among the quieter discoveries was Alserkirche, less monumental but memorable precisely because of that, with plaques in tribute to Schubert (his Mass No.6 premiered there) and Beethoven (where his funeral was held). Taken together with the Beethoven Monument in Beethovenplatz (near Stadtpark), it felt like a kind of double bill: one marking the end of his life, the other his enduring presence in the city’s public imagination.

For a city so shaped by classical music, I saw very little of those tributes. But a return

visit would involve seeking out more of these traces and enjoying performances in the churches, theatres and opera houses I passed.

And then there were the cinemas. My frequent google search, “cinemas near me” in a new town or city, has often led to unexpected discoveries, and Vienna was no exception. It still seems to value cinemas as places rather than merely screens. Among those I stumbled across were Actors Studio, Votiv Kino, Artis International and Cine Center. Some elegant, some a little worn, all woven into the fabric of the city rather than set apart from it.

When I visit again, a trip to Burg Kino to see one of their regular screenings of The Third Man in the city where it was filmed alongside a visit to the Austrian Film Museum will have to be on the list.

Yet what I realised by the end of the trip was not how much I had seen, but how much remains unseen. Vienna feels inexhaustible. Every street seemed to hint at another museum, another fountain, another café, another building worth looking up at properly.

In fact, the trip ended up adding things to my bucket list rather than merely ticking them off.

That happened most directly with one of the two museums I visited, the fascinating and moving Sigmund Freud Museum. Visiting Freud’s former home and workplace in Vienna made me realise there is now an obvious companion pilgrimage to make: the Freud Museum London, less than four miles from where I grew up, but a place I have never visited. He spent the final year of his life there after fleeing Austria in 1938.

Sigmund Freud in Hampstead, from home movies screened at the Freud Museum in Vienna.

Which perhaps says something about what I most enjoy about this whole bucket list project. The best experiences rarely feel self-contained. They reveal new avenues. One place leads to another. One curiosity sparks the next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJeWySiuq1I

Ultravox’s Vienna, shot on location in Vienna and London (Covent Garden), which I’ve borrowed and adapted for the blog’s opening lines.