The city of classical music and coffee houses, Vienna's magnificent public buildings and monuments belie a stormy history that has often left the city in ruins.
In addition to being renowned for producing composers, artists and great thinkers, Vienna has also produced countless skilled professionals to do the restoration work that has followed the several wars, insurrections and the siege of the city by the Red Army in 1945.
Ironically then, the last cruel trick that the 20th century played on Vienna was the ending of the cold war. Through the 1990s, a constellation of previously inaccessible cities such as Prague, Krakow, Dresden and Riga began to glitter. And this caused the Austrian capital's star to dim.
But visitors are now beginning to rediscover a city as beautiful as Prague and as enigmatic as Budapest, and which, unlike either, is not suffering from overexposure to tourism.
The city seems too grand to be the capital of such a modestly proportioned central European nation, but there is a reason for this. For centuries, until the first world war, Austria was the capital of an empire that sprawled over central and eastern Europe. Imperial Vienna also served as a vibrant cultural centre, whose legacy we can still enjoy through the music of Schubert, Strauss and Beethoven, and the decadent artwork of painter Gustav Klimt.
Thanks to a respect for the past in its approach to planning and development, it is identifiably the Vienna of its golden age - a period-architecture wonderland. Here the Romanesque, such as the Ruprechtskirche (Church of St Rupert), coexists with the baroque of the Karlskirche (Church of St Karl) and the art nouveau of the Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station.
Particularly impressive are the imperial palaces of Hofburg and Schonbrunn.