There are lots of museums in Venice. There’s a place called the Museum Quarter, which has a cluster of them. If I visited all the museums I’d probably not get out of Vienna for a while. The journey to the museum revealed the role art plays in the city generally. Vienna is a beautiful place.
Of the museums available, I opted for the Leopold Museum. It is, apparently, the leading museum for Austrian modern art, which I wanted to see.
I had seen some of Klimt’s work and was curious to see more. As well as Klimt, there’s a huge collection of works by Egon Schiele, who’d I’d not heard of but I liked. They were both part of the Venice 1900 — Birth of Modernism exhibition.
There was also a separate Gustave Courbet exhibition which was excellent.
Many famous intellectuals lived in Vienna during the turn of the last century. They were involved in diverse fields, such as literature, journalism, art and philosophy. Some of the ones listed included: Hermann Broch, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Edmund Husserl, Gustav Mahler, Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schönberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stefan Zweig.
I discovered Stefan Zweig last year and went on to read his only two full length novels: Beware of Pity and Post Office Girl, both of which are very good. The short stories and autobiography await.