Vienna

The great rooms here are indoor ones, and planning a Vienna trip around its parks and boulevards gets the city the wrong way round. A place built as the administrative and musical centre of an empire accumulated concert halls, libraries, riding schools, theatres and museums at a rate no single population needed, then kept them all running. Add a long grey winter and a café culture that treats a marble table as rentable floorspace, and the result is a capital whose best hours are spent under a ceiling. Boulevards here are the connective tissue between the rooms, not the point of them.

What the city asks of you

Distances are short and the transport is comprehensive, so Vienna is not a logistical problem. It is an editing problem. The imperial collections alone could absorb a week, the music calendar runs most of the year, and every one of the coffee houses invites you to give it two hours. Visitors who try to see everything come away with a blur of gilt. Visitors who pick three things a day and sit down properly in between come away with the city.

The old centre inside the ring road holds the cathedral, the palace complex and most of what a first visit wants. The ring itself is a nineteenth-century decision made visible: the walls came down, and the boulevard that replaced them was lined deliberately with the institutions of a modernising state. Read the buildings along it in order and you have the argument the city was making about itself.

When to come

Spring and early autumn give mild weather and a full cultural calendar at the same time. December is the other answer and a different one: the markets, the cold, the concert season crowded, and the interiors doing exactly the job they were built for. July and August are hot, and a good share of the musical institutions are on their summer break — the city is still worth seeing then, but it is not performing.

Is it expensive

Vienna is a wealthy city that does not price its cultural life like one. The institutions are publicly held, so the museums, the collections and a great many concerts cost what public institutions charge rather than what a private attraction would. Standing places at the opera exist. Coffee houses are not cheap by the cup, but they are renting you a chair for as long as you want it, which changes the arithmetic considerably.

What pushes a Vienna bill up is the room and the restaurant, in that order. Hotel rates inside the ring reflect the address, and the city's formal dining rooms are priced to match. One lever most people do not pull is distance: public transport is thorough enough that an outer district is central in time, if not on the map.

Where to stay

Splurge

Historic houses on and inside the ring, where the building is part of the experience and the concert halls, the palace and the cathedral are all walkable. You are paying for the address and for rooms on a scale nobody builds now.

Mid-range

District hotels a short tram ride out, in the residential quarters that surround the centre. Better breakfast, more space, a neighbourhood with its own cafés and market, and a journey in measured in minutes.

Good value

Apartments and guesthouses in the outer districts on a direct underground line. What you trade is a commute of a quarter of an hour and no imperial view from the window, in exchange for the ability to stay longer — which in a city that rewards a slow second and third day is often the better purchase.

What is worth the money

The music, first, and not necessarily at the grandest address: the smaller halls and the church programmes belong to the same ecosystem. The imperial collections, because the holdings are what an empire actually accumulated rather than what a museum could assemble later. And a long sitting in a coffee house with a newspaper and no plan, which sounds like a small thing and is in fact the local skill the whole city is arranged around.

Because the room and the district amount to one decision here rather than two, comparing current stay and experience options before fixing dates is worth the half hour.