Alsergrund (9th district)

The 9th district (Alsergrund) lies north of the city center and is shaped by the university, the hospitals and the Old General Hospital (Altes AKH). Accordingly, the crowd in the bars and cafés is young.

Berggasse 19 is home to the Sigmund Freud Museum – deliberately empty rooms, because the original furnishings are in London, where Freud was forced to flee in 1938. This emptiness is the real content. A few streets away is Schubert's Birthplace, a tiny room in a suburban house that tells you more about the circumstances than any biography.

On the Ring stands the Votivkirche (Votive Church), one of the most important Neo-Gothic religious buildings in Europe. For opera and operetta beyond the State Opera, the Volksoper is the place to go.

The district also has a literary history: around 1900, a large part of Vienna's educated middle class lived around Berggasse and Servitengasse. Today Servitengasse is one of the few pedestrian zones in Vienna that isn't about shopping but has simply remained a street – with cafés where you can sit without having anything planned.

Getting there: U2 (Schottentor, Schottenring), U4 (Roßauer Lände, Friedensbrücke), U6 (Währinger Straße), trams 37, 38, 40, 41 and 42 from Schottentor.