Burgtheater

Above the grand staircase of Vienna's national theater on the Ringstrasse, a young Gustav Klimt painted himself into a crowd scene at Shakespeare's Globe — the only self-portrait he ever made. The guide follows Klimt, his brother Ernst, and their friend Franz Matsch decorating the new Burgtheater's stairwells in the 1880s with scenes spanning theater history, a decade before The Kiss made Klimt famous. It also traces the building through 1945, when American bombs and fire gutted the auditorium below. Look up as you climb the stairs.