 View of the Schonbrunn Palace on the outskirts of Vienna. Originally intended as Austria's answer to Versailles, the palace played host to the Habsburg royalty for two centuries. The color yellow was the favorite of Empress Maria-Theresa. The palace's interiors were left almost exactly as they were when the empire was overthrown at the end of World War I. The first rooms you enter as a visitor are those of the last emperor, "the old man," Emperor Franz-Joseph, who slept on a modest single bed and spent most of his day on paperwork. My friend Stacey's grandfather told me how he once met Franz-Joseph in the palace, a story that made a big impression on me back in 2001 and made me want to visit. The palace audio-tour tells how actually the emperor met hundreds of people daily at personal audiences lasting only about a minute, and the guide actually played a recording of the emperor ending one such audience with his formulaic phrase, "It was a pleasure." Napoleon took over the palace and used it as his headquarters in 1805 and 1809 during his two campaigns in Central Europe. Napoleon's son by Marie-Louise (a Habsburg Princess), who was known initially as the "King of Rome" and later as "Franz," the Duke of Reichstadt, was raised as part of the Austrian royal family after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire. He died aged only 22, and his room is kept intact along with some artifacts of his birdwatching hobbies. |