Kunsthistorisches Museum

The Bruegel room: twelve paintings, about a third of everything he left

The Habsburgs collected for four hundred years and then built a museum to hold it, opening in 1891 opposite its identical twin across the square. The picture gallery is one of the half-dozen best in the world: Vermeer, Velázquez, Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Dürer and the Bruegel group that survives because a Habsburg archduke bought it wholesale.

The building itself is worth the ticket. The staircase has a Klimt painted into the spandrels above the first landing, visible from a temporary bridge only occasionally, and the domed café under the cupola is the best room to drink coffee in Vienna.