Court Church, Innsbruck

Court Church, Innsbruck tickets: which one to buy

A modest ticket covers the church and includes an app-based guide; a combined version adds the Tyrolean Folk Art Museum next door, which shares the building and is one of the best regional museums in Austria. Buying the pair is the sensible choice, since the entrances are a few metres apart. Concerts of Renaissance and early music are staged in the church and ticketed separately;

the 1560 organ by Jorg Ebert is one of the oldest playable instruments of its size in Europe and the reason those concerts are worth attending. Innsbruck city passes include entry. Guided tours of the old town stop outside rather than going in. Queues are rare. The church is in the Altstadt beside the imperial palace, two minutes from the Golden Roof, and the whole visit fits comfortably into a morning. Combined tickets with the Ambras castle on the edge of the city are sold in summer and include the shuttle bus.

Visiting Court Church, Innsbruck: what to see

Ferdinand I built the church between 1553 and 1563 as a memorial to his grandfather Maximilian I, and the cenotaph in the middle of the nave is the greatest Renaissance sculpture group in the German-speaking world. Twenty-eight over-life-size bronze figures stand along both sides of the empty tomb: ancestors, relatives and heroes chosen by Maximilian himself, including King Arthur and Theodoric the Great, designed by Duerer among others and cast over decades. Their hands and robes are polished bright where visitors have touched them for luck.

The emperor is not buried here; his body lies at Wiener Neustadt, and the tomb is a monument rather than a grave. Along one wall is the tomb of Andreas Hofer, the innkeeper who led the Tyrolean revolt against Napoleon and was shot in 1810. Above, the Silver Chapel holds the tomb of Archduke Ferdinand II and his commoner wife Philippine Welser. A separate chapel upstairs holds the organ, and the church's floor is a grid of tomb slabs belonging to Tyrolean nobility.

Court Church, Innsbruck opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily with shorter hours on Sundays because of services, from mid-morning to early evening. The church is unheated and cold in winter, which in Innsbruck means most of the year. Summer brings the Festival of Early Music, when the Ebert organ is used regularly. The old town is busiest in the middle of the day and around the Christmas market in December. Dress modestly.

Photography without flash is allowed. Allow forty-five minutes for the church, two hours with the folk art museum. The Hofburg palace is next door and the funicular up to the Nordkette leaves from a few minutes away, which makes a good afternoon after a morning indoors. Innsbruck's old town is small enough that the church, the Golden Roof and the cathedral can all be seen in a single morning.