Vienna Central Cemetery

Where it sits. The Zentralfriedhof lies on Simmeringer Hauptstraße in Simmering, Vienna's 11th district, a good six kilometres southeast of the Innere Stadt — the name describes its importance, not its location. It covers 2.5 square kilometres, holds around 330,000 graves and some three million burials, and still takes up to 25 interments a day. The scale is hard to convey until you are inside: the avenues run for hundreds of metres between plane trees, there is an internal bus route, and the walk from Gate 2 to the far Jewish section takes longer than most visitors expect. Deer, hares and European hamsters live here, and on a weekday morning the birdsong is louder than the traffic.

The story behind it. In 1863 the city concluded that its communal graveyards would not cope with industrial-era growth — planners assumed Vienna would reach four million inhabitants by the end of the twentieth century, the Habsburg collapse of 1918 being unforeseeable. A flat site in Simmering was chosen in 1869 and laid out in 1870 to a competition-winning design by the Frankfurt landscape architects Karl Jonas Mylius and Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli, submitted under the motto per angusta ad augusta. The interdenominational plan — Catholics, Protestants and Jews buried on one ground — provoked serious opposition from conservative Catholic circles, and the consecration on 31 October 1874 was deliberately held at dawn, almost in secret, to avoid confrontation; the official opening followed on All Saints' Day. A Protestant section opened in 1904. Of the two Jewish sections, the older, established in 1863, was devastated in the November pogrom of 1938 and some 60,000 graves stand there in a state of deliberate, moving semi-wilderness.

On screen. The cemetery bookends The Third Man (1949). Harry Lime's staged funeral opens the film here, and his real one closes it — after which comes the long final shot in which Anna Schmidt walks straight down a leaf-strewn cemetery avenue towards the camera and past Holly Martins without a glance. Carol Reed had to fight for that ending against Graham Greene, who had written a more conventional reconciliation; the director's version, held far longer than any studio would have allowed, is now the more famous of the two. The avenue in question is instantly recognisable on the ground, and this is the rare film location that is easier to stand in today than it was to shoot: the trees have grown, but nothing else has changed. Fans of the film usually pair the visit with the Riesenrad and the sewer tour in the city centre.

What you actually see today. The centrepiece is the Art Nouveau church of St Charles Borromeo, built by Max Hegele in 1908–1910, with a green dome and a crypt beneath the high altar holding the mayor Karl Lueger; in front of it lies the crypt of Austria's presidents. Group 32A is the reason many visitors come: the honorary graves of Beethoven and Schubert, both moved here from Währing in 1888, alongside Brahms, Antonio Salieri, Johann Strauss the younger, Christoph Willibald Gluck and Arnold Schoenberg's cube of a headstone. A tall cenotaph honours Mozart, and it is the single most misunderstood object in the cemetery: he is not buried here at all, but in a communal grave at the small St Marx cemetery two kilometres away. Falco lies in a black granite grave that never lacks flowers. Opposite the main gate stands the Feuerhalle Simmering, Vienna's first crematorium, built by Clemens Holzmeister in 1922 in the shape of an oriental fortress. Vienna's Funeral Museum moved to a basement space beside Gate 2 in 2014 and is far better than the subject suggests: reusable coffins from the reforms of Joseph II, elaborate hearse fittings, and a serious account of a city that has always taken a schöne Leich — a beautiful corpse, meaning a well-staged funeral — as a mark of a life properly concluded.

Getting there and timing. Tram 71 from Schwarzenbergplatz runs the length of Simmeringer Hauptstraße to Gate 2, the main entrance and the closest stop to the musicians' graves; tram 6 and S-Bahn line S7 also serve the cemetery. The Viennese phrase for dying is to take the 71. Entry is free, the ground is flat and largely paved, and an internal bus and rentable bicycles help with the distances. Opening hours contract sharply in winter, when the gates close in mid-afternoon. On 1 November, All Saints' Day, thousands of families come with candles and the whole cemetery glows at dusk — the most Viennese thing in the Viennese year, and worth planning around rather than avoiding.