The empire strikes back

There were only two imperial capitals worth their salt in 1900 - Vienna and London. Both cities have balls, albeit of a different kind. Vienna's are the sort you waltz to, and the season is about to begin.

Much of central Vienna dates from the time of the waltz king, Johann Strauss. Of course, there are also the Viennas of Mozart and Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, but you cannot escape the imperial vision that was overlaid on it by Emperor Franz-Josef. With an eye on the boulevards that Baron Haussmann was crashing through Paris, he surrounded old Vienna with a modern, gas-lit Ring of town palaces, grand hotels such as the Imperial, cultural institutions and parks. The name of it echoes Wagner, and it is on a similarly epic scale.

This is eclecticism at its most rampant, versions of the Paris Opera house baring their teeth at Athenian classicism and Gothic Revival in the jungle of style. Too exhausting. Fortunately, you can jolt around the Ring on one of Vienna's jolly red trams (lines 1 and 2); it wasn't made to be walked.

One of the Ring's premier monuments is the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Austria's National Gallery. I don't know whether it was the lunch but I think, as a whole, this has the sexiest painting collection of anywhere in Europe. Late Titian goddesses, Rubens's portrait of his young wife, wrapped in a dark fur and nothing else, Correggio's depiction of Zeus seducing Io in the guise of a fog, Cranach beauties who look very much like modern supermodels - there seems to be a theme here.

Admittedly, they are mixed in with altarpieces of Baroque saints in religious ecstasy but one sort of ecstasy may not be so different from another in the city of Freud. (You can visit Freud's apartment at Berggasse 19, although remember - the Freud Museum in Hampstead, where he died after fleeing the Nazis, has the couch.)

The interior of the Kunsthistoriches is the architectural equivalent of Sachertorte, supposed to have been invented in Vienna some decades before. As though coloured marble, sculpture and gilding weren't enough, they filled in some of the spaces left over with panels by Gustav-Klimt. To get the most out of Klimt you have to cross the Ring and stroll down to the Belvedere Palace. One of their star exhibits is The Kiss - a portentously erotic work much associated with Bluetack and student digs. In Vienna it makes sense. Vienna lives its past. Franz Lehar, light opera composer, used to go to the Café Sperl, which opened in 1880, and it hasn't changed since. Cupids frolic across a ceiling stained yellow by tobacco smoke, newspapers on reading sticks lie on one of the snooker tables. A man puts on his hat and ushers a woman in a loden knickerbocker suit through the mahogany-framed door; you wouldn't know the Austro-Hungarian Empire had ended. There are cafés such as this all over the city. I have dinner at Zum Schwarzen Kameel in Bognergasse, amid a décor of gold tiles. It is one of those solidly unchanging places where the bewiskered ma"tre d'hotel looks like an archduke. But the café next to it, serving little sandwiches and schnapps, is heaving.

So that's where they all go, I thought, as I settled into my boiled beef with two types of horseradish (mit cream and mit apple). Because Vienna doesn't bustle, its charms are of a more sedate kind. Beneath gold-lettered fascias, shop windows display gloves, berets and beautifully made children's clothes ( hunting jacket for a boy, dirndl skirt for a girl). Flowers are sold in a coruscation of vivid colours. It is a city built on sausages - Bratwurst, Burenwurst, Klobasse etc, sold from kiosks with chips - where people wait obediently for the green man at traffic lights and, when I find myself in the wrong place in a queue for the cash machine, a man wanting to get past makes a loud quacking noise in my ear. Europe, but not as we know it.

Go in the autumn or winter. Is it ever spring? The tram and bus drivers announce the stops in a mournful voice, as though they were a matter of infinite regret. There is a feeling that the city wears its great-grandfather's clothes, too exquisitely tailored to throw away but rather too big for the present inhabitants. This capital of an empire now serves a country whose population is under 8m. It takes a ball to wake it up.

Yet as a city of art, turn-of-the-century Vienna was as radical as Paris. Breakaways from the stuffy academy formed the Vienna Secession. Unlike the Impressionists in France, they managed to build a pavilion to house their own shows - a self-consciously arty affair, topped by a dome of golden leaves. The domestic equivalent of this building by Josef Maria Olbrich are the flats and villas by Otto Wagner (no relation to the composer), their walls covered with Art Nouveau-ish decoration. Wagner's Stadtbahn stations - most famously Karlsplatz - are Vienna's answer to the Paris metro.

Wagner's upturned moustaches used to grace the Austrian 500 schilling note. The architects and designers for whom Secession came to seem too ethereal formed another group, the Wiener Werkstatte. Their object was to infuse ordinary life with a better quality of design. It appealed to prosperous families who liked very tall-backed chairs, uncomberry foam?) and the focus is on fresh, local ingredients.