Four Days in Vienna for a Wedding
A friend's wedding at Gartenpalais Liechtenstein was the reason. The rest of the trip just happened around it.
A friend got married in Vienna over the long weekend, which is why I ended up there for four days at the end of April. I had no real plan beyond the wedding. That turned out to be plenty.
Day 1: Trumau
The welcome event was at Weingut Artner, a family winery in the village of Trumau — about 25 km south of Vienna in the Thermenregion wine country. We drove out in the late afternoon. After a long flight, the trip across vineyards and farmland was the moment things actually started. Artner’s tasting room is in a wood-clad cellar that smells like every wine cellar should. By the time we’d worked through a flight and moved out to the courtyard, it was dusk and the string lights were on.
Day 2: Local Exploration by foot
The Naturhistorisches
A friend recommended the Naturhistorisches Museum on Maria-Theresien-Platz, and it didn’t disappoint. The exhibits cover human evolution and Darwinism, dinosaurs, geology, and zoology. We finished with a rooftop tour that walked us through the history of the building itself before stepping out onto the roof — Vienna spread out above the crowded streets below.
Innere Stadt
After the museum, I spent the afternoon walking through the Innere Stadt — Vienna’s historic core, full of narrow streets, small cafés, and more shopping than I had time for.
Museum of Change
Walking back that night, I turned a corner near the Museum of Change and the entire courtyard was running a light show. No ticket, no advance notice. Projections of giant flowers crawling up the walls, lasers fanning across the sky, a crowd of maybe two hundred people.
Wandered into a small bar called Drakon afterwards. Stayed longer than I meant to.
Day 3: The wedding
Gartenpalais Liechtenstein. The Liechtensteins built it in the 1690s as a summer palace and still own it. The wedding was in the gardens behind the palace — tulips in full bloom, hedged paths, white chairs in the spring sun. The palace also doubles as a small museum for the family’s art collection. There’s a gilded 18th-century state coach parked in one of the halls — the Goldener Wagen, built for one of the family’s diplomatic missions to Paris. The reception was inside, under a ceiling fresco painted by Andrea Pozzo around 1708. The DJ set up directly under it. Flashing lights, lasers, projections, smoke, glow sticks — the kind of setup you’d find at a downtown club back in the States, running underneath three hundred years of fresco and gilt. The room handled all of it without complaint.
Day 4: The hop-on-hop-off
Day 4 was the hop-on-hop-off tour, which was great and which should have been Day 1. Live and learn.
Schönbrunn
The State Apartments tour is forty minutes of self-guided audio through the ceremonial rooms — most people race through, a few of us lingered. The Great Gallery is the room you came for: frescoed ceiling, gilt running everywhere, a chandelier count that gets ridiculous. Worth taking your time.
The gardens, and the hike
Behind the palace, the gardens climb up a hill that is bigger than it looks from below. The walk up to the Gloriette — the columned monument crowning the hill — is a real hike, half an hour or so, and it passes the Roman Ruin and the Neptune Fountain on the way. There’s a cafe at the top with ice cream, which is much appreciated.
Prater and Donauinsel
The bus looped me past Prater and Donauinsel to round out the day. Prater is the amusement park with the Riesenrad, the giant Ferris wheel that’s been spinning since 1897. Donauinsel is a long thin island in the middle of the Danube that locals use for cycling and grilling. Both are good for sitting on a bench at the end of a long day.
Looking back
We stayed at the Hilton Vienna Park, right on the Stadtpark and a short walk from the historic core, and walked everywhere from there. One thing that stood out about the city is how much of it is green space — Burggarten, Volksgarten, Augarten, Belvedere grounds, plus a half-dozen smaller parks I cut through without learning the names of. They were always full: locals on benches, dogs, runners, kids on the grass. If you go: do the hop-on-hop-off on Day 1 to get your bearings, give Schönbrunn a half-day for the palace and another for the hike, and just walk. Most of my favorite blocks of time happened between things, not at them.
