Vienna

Kaiserstadt. Imperial capital. The city where the waltz was invented and psychoanalysis was born, where Franz Joseph ruled for 68 years and his empire dissolved like sugar in a Melange. Vienna has made a high art of the beautiful ending.

The Ringstrasse – that grand boulevard of neoclassical palaces Franz Joseph commissioned to announce his power – was begun just as that power was unravelling. Somehow this suits Vienna: a city that raises monuments to the things it is losing. Even the Habsburgs couldn't manage a tidy finale. Their hearts are in the Augustinian Church, their bodies in the Imperial Crypt, their entrails in St. Stephen's. They don't rest in peace. They rest in pieces.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace both the famous arc – the Opera, the Hofburg, the Ringstrasse's origin story – and the layers beneath: the Kaffeehäuser where Freud and Trotsky nursed their respective obsessions over coffee, and the Naschmarkt where a local food obsessive makes the case that Vienna is secretly all about eating. Put your earbuds in. Vienna still has a great deal to say.