Schönbrunn Palace

Schönbrunn was the Habsburgs' answer to Versailles, and in the family's characteristic style it out-lasted rather than out-shouted: 1,441 rooms of "Maria Theresa yellow" where the empress ran Europe's longest family firm, six-year-old Mozart played his first imperial recital (and, legend insists, proposed to the young Marie Antoinette), Napoleon slept twice as an occupier, and the empire formally ended — Karl I signed his renunciation here in 1918. The state rooms on the Imperial Tour deliver the Rococo essentials; the longer Grand Tour adds the Great Gallery where Kennedy met Khrushchev in 1961, still hosting summits of chandeliers.

The honest secret is that the gardens are the equal attraction and free: the great parterre running to the Gloriette arch on its hill (climb it — the café inside serves coffee with the palace framed below), the Neptune fountain, the fake Roman ruin the 18th century built for melancholy walks, and the world's oldest operating zoo (1752, ticketed) folded into the park's corner. Locals treat the whole complex as their weekend park, which keeps it alive rather than embalmed.

Strategy: timed palace ticket booked ahead — Schönbrunn is Austria's most-visited site and summer walk-ups queue long — with the first slots (8:30) or late afternoon the calm windows. Palace first, then gardens uphill to the Gloriette, allow half a day total. The evening variant is one of Vienna's best packages: palace visit, then a Mozart-and-Strauss concert in the Orangerie where Mozart himself premiered — dinner-jacket optional, goosebumps standard. U4 to Schönbrunn station puts you at the gates in 15 minutes from the centre.