Kollegium Kalksburg

Kollegium Kalksburg stands in Vienna's Liesing district, on the edge of the Vienna Woods. A bridge over the Liesingbach brings you to a four-storey school building that forms an honorary court with rectory and fathers' tract. Chapels and a landscaped park with pavilions fill the rest of the grounds. Light hiking routes run through the meadows and woods around it.

The site first carried the Mon Pérou Palace, an eighteenth-century residence of Princess Carolina von Trautson, a lady-in-waiting to Maria Theresa. Court jeweller Franz von Mack acquired the palace and its garden in 1791, developing the grounds further. In 1856 the Jesuits bought the estate from his grandson-in-law August Godeffroy, with financial backing from Emperor Franz Joseph. Cardinal Joseph Othmar von Rauscher consecrated the lower building in October 1856, shortly after the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed. The first year of teaching counted sixty-eight pupils. The National Socialists dissolved the college after the 1938 Anschluss and turned the main building into a police school. Classes resumed in autumn 1947, though the Red Army held part of the building until 1951. Coeducation arrived in 1983, and the boarding school closed in 1990. In 1993 the college became the first school run by the Jesuits' union of religious schools in Austria.

The chapels hold a Maria Immaculata painting by Leopold Kupelwieser and stained glass from the Tyrolean Glass Painting and Mosaic Institute. The park around it goes back to that eighteenth-century garden. A circular pavilion in the style of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux carries obelisks with Masonic symbols. In the former small garden stands the stone house of 1787, one of Austria's most important secular Neo-Gothic buildings. Least solemn of all is the smoking temple, built for Greek lessons during the 1873 World Exhibition, where smoking was permitted.