Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna: The Kunstkammer, the Stolen Saliera and 12 Bruegels
The Kunsthistorisches Museum was built to show off, and it still does. The Habsburgs commissioned it on the Ringstrasse to house the imperial collections, and Emperor Franz Joseph opened it in 1891. Before you see a single painting you walk through marble, gilding and painted vaults, and under a dome that makes the entrance hall feel like a cathedral.
The photo below looks up into it: coffered arches heavy with stucco, red marble columns, a carved doorway framed in gold at the end. Most visitors stop here for a minute with their heads tipped back before heading for the stairs.
The Kunstkammer
The museum's cabinet of curiosities is the Kunstkammer, 20 rooms of the strange and precious things the Habsburg emperors collected: clocks and automata, carved ivories, rock crystal vessels, bronzes, games boards, a narwhal tusk sold as a unicorn's horn. It closed in 2002 and spent a decade shut for renovation before reopening in 2013.
Its star is the Saliera, a gold salt cellar made by Benvenuto Cellini for King Francis I of France in the 1540s, with a sea god and an earth goddess reclining on the rim. In May 2003, while the rooms were under scaffolding, a thief climbed the scaffold, smashed a window and walked off with it. It turned up in January 2006, buried in a box in a forest near Zwettl. It's back under glass now, in the middle of the Kunstkammer.
The Bruegel room
Upstairs in the picture gallery, Room X holds 12 paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the largest group of his work anywhere. The Tower of Babel is here, and the Hunters in the Snow, and the Peasant Wedding. Give this room half an hour on its own. Then see the Vermeer, the Velázquez princesses and the Titians in the rooms around it.
Tickets and timing
As of 2026 an adult ticket costs €22 online or €24 at the door, and under-19s go in free. The museum opens daily 10:00 to 18:00, with late opening on Thursdays until 21:00. Thursday evening is the quietest time to visit.
Have coffee under the dome. The café sits right in the octagonal hall on the first floor, with the dome above you and the staircase below. It isn't cheap and it's often full. Book a table or go at opening.
Allow three hours at least: one for the Kunstkammer, one for the paintings and one for everything you'll stop at on the way. The Egyptian and Greek and Roman collections on the ground floor deserve another visit.
More on the cabinet: Kunstkammer Wien: Inside the Habsburgs' World of Wonders on Travel Marketing.