Last month Vienna hosted the Life Ball, an Aids benefit and Europe's biggest charity event. The streets around City Hall were rammed with revellers, dressed as fantasy creatures, angels and fairies daubed in gold (this year's theme) like Klimt paintings. The festivities, crazy music and transgender catwalk shows went on beyond the early hours. There were posters everywhere of Conchita Wurst, the bearded pop-star drag queen who last year won the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria, and so the event was hosted in Vienna this year.
Given all that, you might think the city had lost its sense of decorum. But that's before you consider the Ringstrasse - a confection of classical buildings and stunning palaces circling Vienna's historic centre. The Ring, as it's affectionately known, is one of Europe's grandest, poshest, and most picturesque boulevards, and this year it is celebrating its 150th anniversary.
To mark the occasion, the city is holding exhibitions, shows and parties at various Ring locations.
The Ring's origins date back to 1857, when Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered the dismantling of Vienna's city walls, built to protect it from its enemies. And while the Habsburg Empire was disappearing, Vienna was emerging as a cosmopolitan city, on a par with London, Paris and Berlin.
By 1865, the first monumental buildings of the Ring had gone up. Fifty years later, Vienna's most ambitious building project was complete: three miles long, 200 feet wide and horseshoe shaped, it begins and ends at the Danube canal.
Civic structures, like the Parliament building, Natural History Museum and Vienna State Opera, were built beside smaller, private developments. Many Jewish bankers and industrialists - with names like Rothschild, Todesco, Wiener and Epstein - who were active collectors and patrons of the arts, built magnificent residences on the Ring; they were the same people who pre-1848 had been forbidden from owning land and property in the city.
Vienna's Jews and their part in creating the Ring, is the subject of a fascinating exhibition at the city's Jewish Museum, which runs until October 18. It reflects on the Ring's glory days, as a centre of world-class arts and the birthplace of psychoanalysis; and its darker moments, the housing shortages, and the rise towards the end of the 19th century of antisemitism, as well as key historical moments, such as how, in 1938, Hitler paraded through the Ringstrasse to the Heldenplatz.
Before the war, Vienna was home to 185,000 Jews, one of Europe's largest communities. During the war, the Jewish population was decimated. Palaces on the Ring, their furniture and artworks, were confiscated by the Nazis. Such was the fate of the Ephrussis, a wealthy banking dynasty profiled in Edmund de Waal's memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes.
With a comfy pair of shoes you can walk the length of the Ring or take a whistlestop tour by tram. The Vienna Ring Tram departs from Schwedenplatz every 30 minutes, 10-5.30pm, all year round, and tours the Old City in 25 minutes. Every avenue harbours a Viennese fancy: a staggeringly beautiful building here, a perfect little statue there, such as Strauss's son, playing a violin, and passes by large, verdant state parks, including Volksgarten.
In the mix are exhibitions that focus on its architecture - the neo-Renaissance Borse, or former stock exchange, neo-Gothic Rathaus, and the Greek-inspired Parliament building, all aglitter with golden-flecked figures (much like this year's Life Ball). There's Vienna through the eyes of artists, writers and photographers, such as Kilmt and Schiele, architect Adolf Loos and composer Carl Goldmark.
A guided tour at the Natural History Museum will take you "Over the rooftops of Vienna" to view the Ring.
And you can walk in the footsteps of the father of psychoanalysis, on a tour from Freud's home (now the Sigmund Freud Museum) to the coffeehouses where he relaxed, such as Cafe Central.
Of course, no visit to Vienna is complete without trying a slice or two of its legendary sachertorte or palatschinken (pancakes), washed down with an Einspänner (espresso topped with whipped cream). Café Mozart, in the Imperial Palace on Albertinaplatz, is a stately coffeehouse and considered the best to try out this regional speciality.
Next door is the legendary Spanish Riding School, a must-see for its spirited, charming Lipizzans horses; some performances are combined with those by the Vienna Boys Choir.
And you'll never be far out of earshot of music, by Strauss, Brahms, Mahler, or Mozart, who spent the last 10 years of his life in Vienna; they all forged the city's reputation as a world leader in classical music in the era of the Ring.
Getting there
Fly easyJet offer flights to Vienna from Gatwick, from £29.49 one way. www.easjet.com.
SEE For info on exhibitions and events on the Ring, some on to the year's end, go to www.vienna.info
Stay Hotel Wilhelmshof offers 4-star luxury and artist-designed rooms. Doubles from ¤99 per
night. www.derwilhelmshof.com
