Castles · Tour

Tram D to the Black Gate, and The Kiss Is Painted in Real Gold Leaf

Admission to the Upper Belvedere with a live guide through the collection. The building was the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy before it was a museum, and the Baroque plan is still legible in every room you walk through. The Klimt holdings here are the largest anywhere, The Kiss among them. Worth knowing before you stand in front of it: the gold is not paint but real gold leaf, laid onto the oil, which is why the surface behaves the way it does as you move across the room. Klimt is where most visitors start and not where the collection ends. The halls run from medieval icons and Gothic winged altars through the Baroque, Romanticism and early Modernism, with original works by van Gogh, Monet and Rodin along the way. The guide connects them, rather than reciting them one by one, and takes in how the palace itself was designed and who lived in it. Getting there: tram line D to the Schloss Belvedere stop, then a minute on foot to the black gate.