Belvedere, Vienna

Listen to the gravel under your feet. It crunches with every step, a dry and steady sound that follows you across the garden. Ahead, the long pale facade of a palace rises against the sky. Its roofline curves and steps like a row of tents pitched along a hill. Water moves quietly in the basins. On a clear day, the air carries the smell of clipped hedges and wet stone. You are standing in the Belvedere, one of the great Baroque palace ensembles of Europe.

The name is Italian, and it means simply a beautiful view. That is the first clue to understanding this place. It was built on a slope just outside the old city walls, so that its owner could look down across his gardens toward Vienna itself. Turn toward the city now. On a good day, you can pick out the tall spire of Saint Stephen's Cathedral on the skyline. The whole design points toward that view.

The owner was Prince Eugene of Savoy. He was born in Paris, and as a young man he was turned down for a career in the French army. So he offered his sword to the Habsburgs in Vienna instead. That decision changed the history of Central Europe. Eugene became one of the most successful commanders of his age. He won major victories against the Ottoman Empire, including the Battle of Zenta in 1697. Those campaigns made him famous, and they made him very rich.

With that wealth, Eugene commissioned two palaces here, one at each end of the garden. His architect was Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, a rival of the other great Viennese Baroque builder of the time. The Lower Belvedere, down near the street, came first. It was finished around 1716 and served as Eugene's summer residence. The Upper Belvedere, the grand building on the hilltop, followed in the early 1720s. It was not really a home at all. It was a stage for receptions and display.

Here is something many visitors miss. Look again at the roofline of the Upper Belvedere. Those rounded, layered copper roofs are often compared to the tents of an Ottoman military camp. Nobody can say for certain that Hildebrandt meant it that way. But the comparison has stuck for a reason. A prince who built his fortune fighting the Ottomans now lived under a roof that looks a little like their campaign tents. It is a quiet joke in green copper, whether intended or not.

The garden between the two palaces was laid out in the formal French style. It drops down the hill in a series of terraces, with cascades, basins, and neat geometric beds. The French designer Dominique Girard worked on it. As you walk, notice how the paths and sightlines keep pulling your eye along the central axis. Nothing here is accidental. Every hedge and every step was planned to frame the view between the two buildings.

Now look for the sphinxes. Several stone sphinxes guard the garden, with the bodies of lions and the faces and chests of women. Visitors, and especially children, have rubbed some of them smooth over the years. In the Baroque age, sphinxes were symbols of wisdom and strength. Here they also hint at classical learning, something a cultured prince wanted guests to notice. Stop beside one and look closely at the carved hair. The stone carries small patches of lichen and centuries of weather.

Prince Eugene died in 1736. He never married, and his estate passed to a niece. She later sold the palace to the Habsburg family, and it came into the hands of Empress Maria Theresa. In the late eighteenth century, the imperial picture collection was moved here and opened to visitors. That makes the Belvedere one of the earliest public art museums anywhere. Paintings that had once hung for a royal few could now be seen by ordinary people.

The palace had other lives, too. In the years before the First World War, the Upper Belvedere was the residence of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne. He left from Vienna on the journey to Sarajevo in 1914, where his assassination helped start the war. So the rooms of this calm hilltop palace sit right at the edge of one of the great turning points of the twentieth century.

Then came 1955. After the Second World War, Austria was occupied by four Allied powers for ten years. On the fifteenth of May that year, the Austrian State Treaty was signed in the Marble Hall of the Upper Belvedere. It restored the country's full independence. Afterwards, Foreign Minister Leopold Figl showed the signed treaty to the crowd from the balcony. Many Austrians still know that image. If you go inside, you can stand in the hall where it happened.

Today, both palaces belong to a single museum. The collection runs from medieval altarpieces to modern art. But most people come for one painting... Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, made in 1907 and 1908. Two lovers wrap together in a field of flowers, their bodies almost lost in gold leaf and pattern. In person, the canvas is larger than many people expect. The gold changes as you move. It catches the light differently from every angle.

The Kiss is not alone. The Belvedere holds a major collection of Viennese art from around 1900, including other works by Klimt and paintings by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. There is also a version of Jacques-Louis David's famous portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps on a rearing horse. And look for the strange character heads by the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Each one shows a face twisted into an extreme expression — grimacing, straining, laughing. They are odd, unsettling, and hard to forget.

Before you leave, walk back to the top of the garden and turn around once more. Let your eye travel down the terraces, past the water and the hedges, to the Lower Belvedere and the rooftops beyond. This is the view Eugene paid for, the one that gave the palace its name. Listen to the gravel again, and the voices drifting up from the paths below. Three centuries later, the beautiful view is still here, and for a few moments, it belongs to you.