Travelling Hopefully

Continuing my sojourn through the Hofburg I wandered through the silver room.  This is a collection of cutlery and crockery.  Don't get the wrong idea.  It is called the silver room but not all the pieces are made out of silver.  Quite a few of them are made out of gold.  Porcelain and crystal are quite well represented as well.  Also linen, apparently no dinner at the Hofburg was complete without intricately folded table napkins.  My audioguide bemoaned the fact that napkin folding is becoming a dying art.  I'm sure its tragic but there are a few other dying arts I might try and save first before leaping to rescue napkin folding.

Most of the silverware isn't actually that old, dating from about the 1830s despite the fact that the Habsburgs had been eating for a least a century or two before that.  The reasons are simple, firstly as the silverware got old and battered from use it was melted down and refashioned into something else but the main reason is the Napoleonic wars.  During the wars the empire was (as usual) desperately short of money and all the silver in the empire was called in to be melted down to pay the soldiers (badly).  The emperor Franz set a personal example by having his entire dinner service melted down.

Moving past various imperial eating utensils (one set of which is still used by the Austrians for state dinners, I wonder what the Czech and Hungarian ambassadors think of that?) we come to the Sisi experience.  It is safe to say that Vienna has a Sisi fetish or at least that the people who visit Vienna and spend money have a Sisi fetish.  I breezed swiftly through that taking in portraits, jewellery, accessories and quotes from her not particularly good poetry.

For the record Sisi was the empress Elisabeth, wife of Franz Josef.  They were possibly the most spectacularly mismatched pair imaginable.  Sisi was beautiful, emotional, neurotic, impatient of court etiquette and possibly the worst choice of partner for a staid, workaholic emperor of limited imagination.  Apparently he adored her.  Whether she returned those feelings is open to doubt but it is probably fair to say she was fond of him and wished him well.

Unable to bear the routines of court life and the behaviour expected of an emperors wife Sisi got away as much as she could travelling almost compulsively more for the journey than because of any particular destination.  She rarely settled in one place for long and was usually longing to depart pretty much as soon as she arrived.  This eventually led to her death as she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist on the shores of Lake Geneva while she waited for a ferry.  After her death the Viennese, who had never liked her much when she was alive, idolised her probably because she was beautiful and tragic two things which are always guaranteed to draw a crowd.

Lest the record seem entirely negative Sisi did render her husband two valuable services.  She helped reconcile him with his Hungarian subjects (Hungary had risen in revolt at the beginning of his reign.  The revolt had been brutally crushed and Hungary had existed in a state of sullen resentment ever since).  Sisi fell in love with all things Hungarian, learnt the language and generally helped make Hungary and Hungarian people more acceptable at court and also made the monarchy more acceptable to the Hungarians.  The second thing she did was introduce Franz Josef to an actress named Katarina Schratt who eventually became the emperors "special" friend although there was no physical aspect to their relationship.  Katarina Schratt could provide the sort of domestic homelife Sisi was utterly incapable of and give the emperor some companionship while his wife was roaming the globe.

Franz Josef's apartments were the real reason I took the tour.  It actually didn't take too long to go through them because in a huge palace complex Franz Josef lived in about half a dozen rather simple rooms one of which was an audience chamber (anyone could get an appointment and drop in on the emperor).  The most important room was the study, Franz Josef spent most of his life there working at his desk.  He logged a twelve to sixteen hour day, seven days a week for sixty eight years.  He even took work on holiday with him. His last words were apparently "wake me tomorrow at four".

Next to the emperor's apartments were the apartments Sisi used on those rare occasions when she was in Vienna.  On her insistence the Hofburgs first bathtub was installed for her use.  Franz Josef, of course, disdained such newfangled things and to the end of his days washed by being sponged down with cold water.

The Spanish Riding School is also in the Hofburg.  This is where the famous dancing horses are trained.  I know they're there because I saw a sign telling me so.  That's as close as I got though because my interest in horses begins and ends with the likelihood of them winding up in my soup.

As if one Habsburg palace wasn't enough the next day I was off to Schonbrunn a little place in the suburbs where the Habsburgs could get away from it all.