Globe Museum

The Globenmuseum is a department of the Austrian National Library and is the only public museum anywhere given over entirely to globes - terrestrial, celestial, lunar, planetary and armillary spheres, some two hundred on display out of a holding of about six hundred, in the Palais Mollard on Herrengasse. The oldest date from the sixteenth century, including work by Gerard Mercator and Vincenzo Coronelli, and the sequence lets you watch coastlines appear, blank interiors fill in and mistakes persist across editions - California as an island, imagined southern continents. Celestial globes show the constellations from outside, mirror-reversed, which takes a moment to understand. The same building holds the Esperanto Museum, another only-one-of-its-kind, on the same ticket.

History

The Imperial Library, forerunner of the Austrian National Library, already held globes in the 19th century, among them two made by Vincenzo Coronelli for Emperor Leopold I, each with an engraved portrait of the emperor. The geographer Eugen Oberhummer counted eight globes and two armillary spheres in 1921, they went to the library's map collection in 1922, and in 1956 the library opened the Globe Museum with 63 exhibits, joining the imperial collection with those of the Coronelli Society and the cartographer Robert Haardt; first housed in the Augustinian wing of the Hofburg on Josefsplatz, it had 260 exhibits by 1996 and moved to the Palais Mollard on Herrengasse at the end of 2005 (Wikipedia, Globe Museum).

The main sights

• Some 200 globes on show - terrestrial, celestial, lunar and armillary, from the 1500s on.
• Mercator and Coronelli - major names of globe making in the collection.
• Errors preserved across editions - California as an island and phantom continents.
• The Esperanto Museum - the other unique collection in the same palace.

When to go

All year. An hour or two.

Things to know

It is a specialist museum and small - an hour or two, not a half day. Lighting is low to protect the paper. Closed Mondays. Labels are fuller in German than English.

Nearby

The Hofburg, the National Library state hall and the Graben are minutes away.

Key facts