Vienna

Vienna is the city where the Habsburgs built an empire's worth of palace, museum, and opera house into a 1st district that takes 30 minutes to walk across. The Kunsthistorisches Museum holds one of the great art collections in Europe (Bruegel, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Velázquez — all accumulated by imperial patronage). The Vienna State Opera has performed continuously since 1869. The Ringstraße boulevard, commissioned by Franz Joseph I in 1857, is the most complete example of 19th-century imperial urban planning still in use. And Café Central — where Trotsky, Freud, and Hitler all sat at separate tables in the early 20th century — is still serving coffee and Apfelstrudel. The Vienna school of psychoanalysis, the Vienna Secession, the Vienna Philharmonic: the city produced a century of ideas and then turned them into the best tourist infrastructure in Central Europe.