Mariahilf is the shopping district, and most people walk its great mile, buy something, and miss the better half — the quiet Grätzl (a small neighbourhood) one street back. This walk does both: the Mariahilfer Straße, then the calm behind it.
Start at Museumsquartier and take the lower, part-pedestrianised stretch of the street, where they handed the middle of the road back to people on foot. Slip into the Mariahilfer Kirche for the sudden quiet, then drop a block south to Gumpendorfer Straße and Café Jelinek, the kind of unrenovated Kaffeehaus (a Viennese coffee house) the city is slowly losing. Stay for the second coffee.
Then the oddest thing on the route: the Haus des Meeres, a flak tower from the war turned into an aquarium, ten storeys of grey concrete with a rooftop view. Past the Raimund Theater and on to Westbahnhof, where the U3 and U6 take you on. Three kilometres, two cities — the loud one and the quiet one — in one street's width.
