Step across the Ring behind the great museums and Vienna changes scale. The palaces give way to two-storey houses, the boulevards to cobbled lanes, and the court's grandeur to a neighbourhood that spent most of its history with a bad name and is now one of the city's favourite places to wander.
This walk starts at a theatre built for ordinary Viennese, passes a prince's palace, threads through the lanes of Spittelberg, crosses the imperial stables that became a museum district, and drops down an Art Nouveau stair to finish in a coffee house that has been pouring since 1880. All six stops are close together, so there is time to go inside the ones that tempt you.
1. Volkstheater: a stage for the middle class
The Volkstheater opened on 14 September 1889 with a play by Ludwig Anzengruber, who founded it with the industrialist Felix Fischer. Their idea was pointed: a middle-class counterpart to the aristocratic court theatre, with classical and modern drama at prices a broad public could afford. The building is by Fellner & Helmer.
Until 1945 it was the Deutsches Volkstheater, a name that set it apart from the stages of the monarchy's other nationalities. It still plays a full season today.
2. Palais Trautson: Fischer von Erlach in miniature
A few steps west on Museumstraße stands Palais Trautson, built in 1712 by Christian Alexander Oedtl to plans by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach for Count, later Prince, Johann Leopold Donat Trautson. It belongs to the building boom that followed the Turkish siege of 1683, and it counts among the most important Baroque buildings in the city.
In 1760 Maria Theresa bought it for 40,000 gulden and handed it to her Hungarian Guard, who turned the garden into a riding school. Today it is the seat of the Federal Ministry of Justice, so you see it from the street: look up at the reliefs from ancient myth set above many of the windows.
3. Spittelberg: from slum to protected village
Turn south into Spittelberg and the city shrinks to a village. The name comes from the Bürgerspital, the citizens' hospital that acquired this pastureland in 1525. Burgenland Croats settled here; their "Croatian village" appears on an engraving of 1609 and was destroyed in the siege of 1683. The houses were rebuilt, and many cellars below them are older than the siege.
From the 18th century until the middle of the 20th, Spittelberg had a poor reputation: cramped, unhealthy buildings and a centre of the city's prostitution. Its Biedermeier houses and narrow lanes survived, and today the city protects them as a conservation zone, they lie within the UNESCO World Heritage site of the historic centre, and the lanes are full of bars, small shops and craft workshops.
Walk Spittelberggasse, the main lane, and let the side streets pull you off it. In winter the quarter is best known across Vienna for its annual Christmas market.
4. MuseumsQuartier: the emperor's horses moved out
At the bottom of the lanes, a long Baroque front hides a whole district of museums. The MuseumsQuartier occupies the imperial court stables, commissioned by Emperor Charles VI from Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach in 1713 and completed by his son Joseph Emanuel in 1723, with room for 600 horses and 200 carriages. From 1921 into the 1970s the stables served as Vienna's trade fair palace.
The conversion by the architects Laurids and Manfred Ortner opened in 2001, setting new museum blocks into the old courtyards: the Leopold Museum, mumok for modern art, the Kunsthalle Wien and the Architekturzentrum Wien all sit here. You don't need a ticket to enjoy it. The courtyards are a public living room, scattered with the oversized loungers designed by the architects PPAG, whose colour the public picks by vote.
5. Fillgraderstiege: Art Nouveau for a hillside
Cross Mariahilfer Straße into the sixth district and follow Theobaldgasse to the top of the Fillgraderstiege. Vienna drops steeply here from Mariahilfer Straße towards the valley of the Wien river, and between 1905 and 1907 the architect Max Hegele bridged the slope with this staircase down to Fillgradergasse, in the style of the Viennese Jugendstil.
It is named after Marie Anna Fillgrader (1763 to 1831), the widow of a bell-founder who did charitable work in the neighbourhood. Take it slowly: the stair is the point, not a shortcut.
6. Café Sperl: the coffee house that stayed
At the foot of Fillgradergasse, turn onto Gumpendorfer Straße for Café Sperl, opened in 1880 as Café Ronacher and renamed within its first year after the Sperl family who bought it. Parquet floors, Thonet bentwood chairs, marble tables, chandeliers and carom billiard tables make it a textbook Viennese coffee house, and it is on Austria's register of historic places.
Before the First World War its regulars included officers from the nearby military academy, artists and actors; writers such as Robert Menasse have sat here more recently. Film audiences know it from Before Sunrise (1995) and A Dangerous Method (2011).
Café Sperl is closed on Sundays in July and August. On those days, end the walk in the MuseumsQuartier courtyards instead.
What the walk adds up to
In a short stretch you have seen the two ways the city grew outside its walls: the palaces and stables the court built when the Turkish threat had passed, and the crowded houses of the people who served it. The theatre answered the court's stage, Spittelberg survived its reputation, the stables traded horses for art, and the coffee house kept its billiard tables. That mix, grand and small side by side, is what makes this corner of Vienna worth the short step outside the Ring.