Central Cemetery

This guide to Vienna's Central Cemetery starts at its quiet, unpopular opening at dawn on October 31, 1874, when the Catholic Church objected to mixed-faith burials and ordinary Viennese simply stayed away. It follows the city's unusual fix: in 1888, workers exhumed the graves of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert across town and reburied them here side by side, and in 1891 a grieving-muse monument went up nearby to mark the centenary of another composer's death. Stand at that memorial and look closely at what the guide asks you to notice about who is actually buried beneath it.