Vienna

Vienna's reputation arrives before you do, and it is expensive — palaces, gold frames, an orchestra in white tie. Followed literally, that reputation costs around €23 a door. The version of the city people come back for is cheaper and much more of it is outdoors: a €13 place at the opera rail, a lake with its own U-Bahn stop, six hundred hectares of working vineyard inside the municipal boundary, a tram line whose number is local slang for dying. Two paid rooms are worth the money; the rest costs less than lunch.

The two rooms worth paying for

The Kunsthistorisches Museum keeps twelve panels by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in a single room. Hunters in the Snow is on one wall and The Tower of Babel on another, and you can turn slowly on the spot through most of a working life that lasted barely a decade. It is a room people sit down in and then stay in. The rest of the building holds over 770 Habsburg pictures, Vermeer's The Art of Painting among them, and trying to see all of it in one visit is the reliable way to remember none of it. Admission is €22 online or €24 at the door, free under 19, and Thursday runs to 9 p.m.

The other is Klimt's The Kiss, in the Upper Belvedere across the Ring — a Baroque summer residence built high on a slope, so the formal garden falls away in front of it with the city stacked up behind. Entry runs on timed slots rather than a queue, which makes it a thing you book rather than a thing you drift into.

Standing at the opera, then eating a sausage

The Staatsoper sells standing places, and they are the reason to try opera here even if you have never sat through one. Tickets are €13 in the balcony, €15 in the gallery and €18 at parterre level, sold online from 10 a.m. on the day, or from a separate box office under the Operngasse arcade that opens 80 minutes before curtain. Your spot is numbered now, so the old ritual of claiming a place with a scarf is over, and there are padded rails to lean on and small monitors carrying English surtitles. The parterre rail is about as central as the house gets and sits just above stage height, which for the price of two coffees is a fairly unbalanced deal.

When it empties out, most of the crowd walks two minutes to Albertinaplatz, where a sausage stand sits between the opera house and the Danubius fountain. Bitzinger runs from 8 a.m. to 4 a.m. every day. Order a Käsekrainer — a pork sausage with cheese running through it, split down the middle and handed over with mustard and a slice of bread. Vienna does a great many things in evening dress; this is not one of them, and it is the better half of the night.

The wine is grown inside the city

Vienna is the only capital that farms wine commercially at this scale within its own limits — around 637 hectares, most of it on the hills curving along the northern edge. The local style has legal protection: Wiener Gemischter Satz DAC requires at least three white varieties interplanted in the same vineyard and picked together, with no single grape making up more than half the plot. Field blends nearly died out everywhere else. Here they are the house wine.

City Hiking Trail 1 starts and ends at the Nussdorf terminus of tram D — eleven kilometres, three and a half to four hours, up through beech woods to Kahlenberg at 484 metres and back down the Nussberg between the vine rows with the Danube underneath. Do it in that order. The reward at the bottom is Wieninger am Nussberg on Eichelhofweg, where you sit on grass in the middle of the vineyard with biodynamic wine by the glass, Thursday afternoons through Sundays, roughly April to the start of November.

Summer is spent in the water

The Alte Donau is an old bend of the river, severed from the main channel when the Danube was straightened for flood control. What is left is a still lake of 1.6 square kilometres with a U-Bahn station on its shore, and the city treats it the way coastal cities treat a beach. You can swim for nothing from the public lawns at Romaplatz or the Rehlacke, or pay in to one of eleven lidos. Around 500 boats are available to hire, and the season runs roughly mid-May to mid-September. On a 34-degree Viennese afternoon this is not a consolation prize; it is the plan.

Ask about the 71

Ask a Viennese about the 71 tram and you may get a joke instead of directions. Taking the 71 is the local euphemism for dying, because the line was laid to carry funerals out to the Zentralfriedhof, which opened on All Saints' Day in 1874 and now holds roughly 330,000 graves across two square kilometres. Group 32A is where you go: Beethoven in grave 29, Schubert in 28, Johann Strauss the younger in 27, Brahms in 26. The Mozart memorial standing among them marks nothing at all — his burial place was lost at St Marx. Falco is out in Group 40, a different kind of pilgrimage ten minutes away on foot. Entry is free, and the gates open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. from April to September.

A long lunch at the Naschmarkt

The Naschmarkt runs along the covered course of the River Wien with around 130 stalls and a newer indoor hall at one end. The end nearest Karlsplatz is mostly restaurant terraces with people outside holding menus; it gets better the further you walk. What you want is Urbanek, a Greißler with no cooked food and nowhere to sit, where you stand at a shelf with a glass of wine while ham and cheese are cut to order and men in suits share the shelf with the market traders. Stalls run from 6 a.m. to around 6 or 7 p.m., and Sundays only the restaurants open. Saturday mornings the flea market takes over the far end from 6.30 until 2, at a strike rate somewhere between antiques and junk.

How to put it together

Three days is about right. A museum in the morning while the light is no use to you anyway, water or vineyard in the afternoon, the opera rail at seven, Albertinaplatz at eleven. Vienna rewards booking one thing a day and leaving the rest of it to the trams.