Belvédère

The Upper Belvedere was built as a summer showpiece for Prince Eugene of Savoy, the general whose armies broke the Ottoman siege lines and won Habsburg Austria much of its empire. Between 1717 and 1723 the architect Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt gave him a gold-and-white Baroque palace on a slope above Vienna, with a second, lower palace and formal gardens running down between them.

Most visitors now climb that hill for a single painting. In a plain upstairs room hangs Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, from 1908 — two figures kneeling in a field, wrapped together in a robe of gold leaf and pattern, the man bending to the woman's cheek. Klimt made it at the height of his gold period in Vienna, and the Austrian state bought it almost at once. The Belvedere holds two dozen of his paintings, the largest group anywhere, including the shadowy Judith with the head of Holofernes.

The palace has one more claim on the country's memory. In the Marble Hall, under a ceiling fresco of Prince Eugene's victories, foreign ministers signed the Austrian State Treaty on 15 May 1955, ending ten years of Allied occupation after the Second World War. The politician Leopold Figl carried the signed document out onto the balcony and held it up to the crowd below, and photographs of that moment hang in the building today.