Karlsplatz — finale

And here we are, at the end — on Karlsplatz, where Vienna's long architectural story finally catches up to the modern age. Take it all in. Across the water of the reflecting pool rises the Karlskirche, widely called the most beautiful Baroque church in the city. An emperor vowed to build it after a plague, and it went up in the early seventeen hundreds to the design of Vienna's greatest Baroque architect. Notice the two enormous columns flanking the dome — a deliberate echo of the triumphal columns of ancient Rome.

Now look to the other side of the square, at something much smaller but just as revolutionary: Otto Wagner's two little railway pavilions. Wagner built them in the eighteen-nineties as stations for the city's first metropolitan railway, and they are pure Jugendstil — apple-green iron frames, panels of white marble, gilded sunflowers across the front, treating even a subway entrance as a work of art. One pavilion is a café today; the other, a little museum.

And that is the whole arc of our walk, in a single view. We began under the Gothic spire of St Stephen's, strolled the Baroque boulevards, passed the grand imperial Opera — and we end here, where a Baroque church and an Art Nouveau railway stop face each other across a square. Stone and food, the two threads of this city, braided together the whole way down.

So find a café chair, with a coffee or a little pink Punschkrapfen in hand, and sit with it a while — you've earned it. And when you're ready to move on, Karlsplatz is a major transit hub where the U1, U2 and U4 lines meet — a single U1 stop back to Stephansplatz, where we began.

Thank you for walking Vienna with me. Travel well.