The Festive Issue

We begin the magazine in the cold, in a city that knows what to do with it. Vienna in December is an argument for the indoor life: markets that pull you between squares, coffee houses where one mélange stretches across an afternoon, and two palaces that dress their courtyards in wooden stalls. This is Volume Zero, our charter year, and we could think of no better place to start than one that has spent two centuries perfecting the warm room and the short walk between them.

This issue is about where to stay, and Vienna makes the question sharp. Stay inside the Ring and you pay for the postcode but never face a cold ride home. Stay in Neubau, behind the MuseumsQuartier, and you trade half a star for a neighbourhood where people actually live rather than one dressed for visitors, with the Spittelberg market at the end of the street. We come down on the side of the short walk. In this weather, proximity is the only comfort that matters.

The markets run from mid-November and mostly close on Christmas Eve; the great ball season belongs to January and February, not December; the New Year's Concert is allocated by lottery a year ahead and cannot be bought on the day. We have checked the shape of the month so that you plan around what is true. Come in the first three weeks for the season with room to move, and treat any snow over Schönbrunn as the bonus it is.

We have kept the columns close to the ground. The Room weighs the Ringstrasse palaces against a townhouse three streets from the cathedral. The Table settles into Café Central and the old Sachertorte quarrel. The Arrival argues for the train over the plane, and the Detour points east to Bratislava or up the Danube to the Wachau. Read them aloud, as we do, and if a sentence sounds like a brochure, tell us, because it means we failed. Welcome to Amorielli.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief