Ferstel Passage
Vaulted glass-roofed shopping arcade with a mermaid fountain, linking a former stock exchange to a legendary coffeehouse.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Ferstel Passage in Vienna opens with a Habsburg count's dismissive joke about a chess-playing regular at Cafe Central, a Russian exile named Bronstein, and traces how that offhand remark aged. You'll walk the vaulted stone corridor architect Heinrich von Ferstel built around 1860 as part of a bank and stock exchange, and hear about the poet Peter Altenberg, who used the cafe next door as his home address and is said to have settled at least one bill with a poem on a napkin. Look for the bronze mermaid fountain in the passage's courtyard before you reach the story's turn.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Palais Ferstel
Venetian-Florentine palace built as a bank, now home to a storied literary coffeehouse.
Café Central
Grand nineteenth-century coffeehouse under vaulted marble arches, once the haunt of writers, chess players and revolutionaries in exile.
Café Sperl
Art Nouveau coffeehouse with billiard tables, marble surfaces and crystal chandeliers, unchanged for over a century.
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.
Café Hawelka
Dim, smoke-worn literary coffeehouse famed for wood-stove-baked Buchteln served nightly since the postwar era.