Café Sperl
Art Nouveau coffeehouse with billiard tables, marble surfaces and crystal chandeliers, unchanged for over a century.
Location
About this audio guide
Cafe Sperl in Vienna follows the Siebenerclub, a circle of young rebel architects including Josef Hoffmann and Josef Maria Olbrich, who gathered over billiards here through the 1890s. The guide traces how their arguments at these tables led to founding the Vienna Secession in 1897. It also covers the cafe's own history, opened in 1880 by cycling impresario Jakob Ronacher before passing to the Sperl family, and the composers who later took coffee here.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Café Central
Grand nineteenth-century coffeehouse under vaulted marble arches, once the haunt of writers, chess players and revolutionaries in exile.
Palais Ferstel
Venetian-Florentine palace built as a bank, now home to a storied literary coffeehouse.
Café Landtmann
Grand Ringstrasse coffeehouse of marble tables and bentwood chairs, favored haunt of Sigmund Freud.
Café Prückel
Grand nineteen-oh-three coffee house reshaped into a nineteen-fifties modernist landmark with custom Lobmeyr chandeliers.
Secession
Art Nouveau exhibition pavilion crowned by a gilded dome of laurel leaves, nicknamed the golden cabbage.
Café Hawelka
Dim, smoke-worn literary coffeehouse famed for wood-stove-baked Buchteln served nightly since the postwar era.