My time in Vienna was very short. I got in late and left early. Had just a couple of hours to wander around the Belvedere Gardens, which are impressive but, like the rest of Europe’s public spaces at the moment, scorched.

What should be impressive vistas of elegant topiary, tidy pathways and green lawns is now a collection of patchy dusty browns with carefully placed plants and trees wilting in the heat. The place is packed with tourists, queueing in the bright sunshine for entrance to the ancient palaces.

I’ve never understood why one would pay to traipse around in a line staring at ancestral portraits, spindly chairs unholstered in garish fabrics, four-poster beds made for midgets with far too many layers of heavy bedding, and room after room of statues, vases, cabinets, tapestries, clocks and cutlery.

I once visited Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the mighty pile that the first Lord Walpole had built for himself in his pomp. I came away feeling quite nauseous about how he must have hoovered up every material resource within 50 miles of the place in order to create his palace, and must have drawn pretty much everyone who could walk into his service.

The Hall sits there like a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking in all the metal, wood, gold, silver, paint, food, fuel, stone, brick and even all the animals (deer, cow, sheep, dog) from the whole of North Norfolk and beyond. The amount of energy that must have been consumed to drag everything grand to that place – marble from Italy, furniture from France, rare plants from America etc – is revolting to think about. Belvedere leaves me with the same feeling.

My time in Munich is short too. I manage to push myself out of my hotel and take advantage of a late opening time of the Galerie an der Pinakothek der Moderne, a massive art barn plonked beside a public park where dozens of the better-looking and younger locals intensely practice outdoor dance exercise, onerous fitness routines, stretching, weightlifting, boxercise and salsa (not all at once).

Battling through this frenzy of noisy exertion, it becomes quite hard to find the entrance to the art gallery. Once inside, there is sudden echoey silence and no signeage in a massive white stone auditorium. In the distance a tiny ticket office with one person quietly sits behind a glass screen. A couple of security guards in Covid masks lean against a wall and whisper to each other. It feels like a scene from ‘Brazil’ when Price has to visit Palin in some vast civic torture hall.

The place is a maze across umpteen floors. There is no map or guide. Each room leads to another room that then has side rooms that leads to another corridor or set of stairs.

There is Joseph Beuys’s felt suit hanging on a wall. I accidentally wander into a long airhanger space that is a tribute to the architecture design effort that gave us the Munich 1972 Olympics. In the basement I find a collection of German concept cars.

Everywhere there is art, old and new. A Vasari in a corridor knocks up against a spread of UK pop art, then a scroll of chaotic black squiggles by a contemporary Iranian artist. The curators have clearly decided on a policy of placing older pieces from the collection alongside more recently acquired paintings, prints and sculpture – and then attempting to establish a link or a theme in each space using windy and specious art text.

To be fair, the juxtapositions are often surprising and sometimes interesting – with no need for curator-speak to explain it. There are Warhols, Picassos, Klees, Cezannes – all the big hitters – hanging alongside a range of contemporary German, Polish, Austrian and Czech artists I’ve obviously never heard of. I’m made to feel as if the world is suddenly full of fine artists rattling off busy, messy, fractured replies to what the Old Modern Masters have mysteriously telegraphed into the future. They’re all around me these people. I am surrounded by artists! There are even some British painters in here that appear to be much heralded In Germany, but I’ve never seen any of their work in a gallery back in the UK or read about them in a magazine.

I mean, who the hell is Cecily Brown!?

I leave feeling a bit confused and overwhelmed, pushing my way through the crowds of salsa dancers and boxercisers. It’s a balmy evening in Munich. A lot of people are out on the streets. It’s the first German town where I see a lot of homeless people and beggars. I am tempted to enter a beer garden until I see the sweaty corpulent crowds within. Instead I buy a McDonalds meal and head for my hotel room. That is enough Kultur for one day.