Minoritenkirche

Minoritenkirche tickets: which one to buy

The Minorite church stands on a quiet square behind the chancellery in the middle of Vienna, two minutes from the Hofburg and skipped by almost every visitor heading for the cathedral or the Karlskirche. Entry is free. It serves the Italian-speaking Catholic community and has done since the eighteenth century, so the services are in Italian and the noticeboard is bilingual. Walking tours of the inner city pass the square; few go in, which is their loss.

The reason to make the short detour is one object, a full-size mosaic copy of Leonardo's Last Supper, which is not the sort of thing you expect to find behind a chancellery. Concerts are held here occasionally. Nothing needs booking and the church is open through the day, which in this part of Vienna makes it a useful refuge between museum visits. Italian-language services are listed at the door and are the only times the nave is closed to visitors.

Visiting Minoritenkirche: what to see

The Franciscans of the Minorite branch were given the site in 1276 and their church is one of the oldest Gothic buildings in Vienna. Its most obvious feature is what is missing: the tower was shot away during the Ottoman siege of 1529 and never rebuilt to a point, so it ends in a flat, slightly comic stub that locals have been explaining to visitors ever since. The west front keeps a fine fourteenth-century porch with carved figures.

Inside, the building was stripped of its baroque fittings in the 1780s and returned to a bare Gothic hall of three aisles with slender piers. On the north wall hangs the mosaic of the Last Supper, commissioned by Napoleon from Giacomo Raffaelli, made in Rome over eight years from tens of thousands of tesserae; the emperor fell before it was delivered and the Austrian court bought it instead. The mosaic measures about nine metres across and was made in sections that were shipped separately.

Minoritenkirche opening hours and the best time to go

Open through the day with a short break; services in Italian are held on Sundays and visiting stops then. The square outside is one of the calmest in the inner city and has a fountain and a few benches. Vienna is busiest in summer and over the Christmas markets, one of which fills the square in front of the town hall a few minutes away through December. The Advent market on this square is small and pleasant by comparison.

Winter afternoons are dark and the interior is dim, so a bright day is worth waiting for if you want to look at the mosaic properly. The Hofburg, the national library and the Albertina are all within ten minutes, and the coffee houses in the streets around here are the old kind rather than the tourist kind. Twenty-five minutes covers the church. A small Advent market fills the square in December and the church stays open through it.