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 and fifty on display out of a much larger holding, 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.

What you actually see

• Some 250 globes - 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.

Honest expectations

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.