Experience Vienna

Proper citizens of Vienna, it has been said, waltz only from the waist down, holding their upper bodies ramrod straight while whirling around the crowded dance floor. The movement resulting from this correct posture is breathtaking in its sweep and splendor, and its elegant coupling of free-wheeling exuberance and rigid formality -- of license and constraint -- is quintessentially Viennese. The town palaces all over the inner city -- built mostly during the 18th century -- present in stone and stucco a similar artful synthesis. They make Vienna a Baroque city that is, at its best, an architectural waltz.