Belvedere Palace

Prince Eugene of Savoy won the Habsburgs’ Ottoman wars, and then he built himself two palaces on a slope south of Vienna with a formal garden running between them. Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt raised the Lower Belvedere first and finished the Upper by 1723. The name is Italian for beautiful view, and from the terrace in front of the Upper Belvedere you get exactly what he paid for: the parterre dropping away in tiers, and the city standing behind it with St Stephen’s spire in the middle of the frame.

Go up first

The Upper Belvedere is the one with the Klimts, and the one to book if you only do one. It holds the largest collection of his paintings anywhere, with The Kiss at the centre of it — two figures on a flowering ledge under a metre and a half of gold leaf, painted in 1908–09 and bought by the Austrian state before Klimt had finished it. Judith is here too, and so are Egon Schiele’s self-portraits and family groups, Kokoschka, Waldmüller’s Biedermeier Vienna, and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s character heads, grimacing in lead and alabaster.

Don’t rush the building

The entrance is a low, cool Sala Terrena held up by four straining stone atlantes. Above it the Marble Hall runs the full height of the palace in red and ochre stucco: on 15 May 1955 the Austrian State Treaty was signed in this room, and Leopold Figl carried the document out onto the balcony to show the crowd below. The Lower Belvedere, which was Eugene’s actual summer residence, keeps its own Marble Hall, Hall of Grotesques and Golden Room, and now takes the changing exhibitions.

Timing your visit

Entry to both palaces is by time slot, but once you are through the door nobody moves you along. Ninety minutes covers the Upper Belvedere’s highlights; three hours does both palaces and the walk between them. That walk is the best free thing on the site — Dominique Girard laid the garden out on three terraces with sphinxes, cascades and clipped hedges, and it is open whenever the museums are.