St. Stephen's Cathedral

The south tower of Stephansdom took sixty-five years to build, and when it was finished in 1433, it was the tallest structure in Christendom. At 136 metres, it still makes everything around it look like an afterthought. The Viennese call it "Steffl" — little Stephen — which is the kind of aggressive understatement only a city this old can pull off.

The cathedral's roof is its party trick. Some 230,000 glazed tiles arranged in zigzag patterns spell out the double-headed eagle of the Habsburg dynasty and the coats of arms of both the city and the Austrian Republic. The original medieval tiles were destroyed when the roof caught fire in the final days of World War II — not from Allied bombing, but from looters who set fire to nearby shops and let the flames spread. The Viennese rebuilt it tile by tile by 1952.

Below the cathedral lies a network of catacombs containing the remains of roughly 11,000 people, buried there between 1745 and 1783 after the city's surrounding cemeteries were closed during a plague outbreak. In a separate ducal crypt, copper urns hold the entrails of dozens of Habsburg rulers — their hearts went to the Augustinerkirche, their bodies to the Kapuzinergruft. The Habsburgs took the concept of "spreading yourself thin" disturbingly literally.

Mozart had a complicated relationship with this building. He was married here, two of his children were baptised here, and his funeral rites were held here in December 1791. His body was then carted off to St. Marx Cemetery in a pauper's funeral — though that's actually a myth. He received a standard middle-class burial; it's just that nobody thought to mark the grave.