Vienna's Ringstrasse: Palaces, museums, apartment blocks and parks

There's a lot to like about the Ringstrasse. You can keep your Champs-Elysées with its tourist hordes and tatty food outlets, your snooty Fifth Avenue and The Mall in London, more ceremonial carpet than actual avenue. The Ringstrasse is all things to all people: grand and intimate, ornately urban and leafy green, laden with culture but surprisingly relaxed, too.

Unlike many grand boulevards, it doesn't culminate in a single mighty building. The Ringstrasse is a merry-go-round of palaces and museums, apartment blocks and parks. It provides imperial glamour yet suits the modest capital of what's now a little nation. Ride around it on the tram, pedal its cycle paths, walk its promenades, sit on public benches and crane your neck at its ever more startling architecture.

Emperor Franz-Josef presided over the Ringstrasse's opening ceremony in 1865. The city's fortifications had been demolished to make way for a more open, modern city with a swelling population, and the military parade grounds beyond the walls were turned into a five-kilometre looped boulevard.

From the start, the Ringstrasse was a huge success. It became the thing to stroll along it, especially between Kärntnerstrasse and Schwarzenbergplatz, the corner of which became the place to rendezvous. Along it carriages clopped and trams rattled. Eventually motor vehicles necessitated Vienna's first traffic lights in 1926. The Ringstrasse is now one of the city's busiest roads, although this isn't always apparent thanks to flanking parks, promenades and overhanging trees.

You could walk the Ringstrasse in an hour, or take the tourist Vienna Ring Tram and plug into headphones for information about sights along the 25-minute loop. Don't forget to look up. The Ringstrasse is an open-air museum of architectural styles, from the ancient Greek (Parliament), Renaissance (State Opera, Natural History Museum) and Gothic (City Hall) to the baroque (Burgtheatre). Statues wave from rooftops and gargoyles leer.

With stops at museums and cafés, however, the Ringstrasse can easily take all day. Start at the Hofburg palace. Skip the elaborate state apartments, whose endless gilt and red silk don't appeal to modern tastes. Better take in baroque's living remnants. The palace features the Spanish Riding School and its white horses, while Hofburg Chapel offers the Mozart music that embodies the zest and wit of the era.

Across the road, set back from the Ringstrasse, is the Museums Quarter, where 19th-century palaces and contemporary glass-and-concrete extrusions clash. Free-form benches in jaunty yellow and red are the place to hang out on summer evenings: a sort of open-air salon where students murmur and giggle. If you have limited time, visit just the chamber of curiosities at the Museum of Art History. It's a treasure-trove of Hapsburg collectibles that range from peculiar drinking goblets to mechanical dancing bears, clocks and scientific tools.