Cover of OUR SUMMER IN SLOVENIA
Empress Maria Teresa's grand state carriage with Elysee prepared as a lady in waiting.
Excerpted from my book OUR SUMMER IN SLOVENIA: Amazon.com
Our second day in Vienna was set aside for museums. Vienna has a wide variety of museums, with the best collection of sessionist art, including Gustav Klimt evoking a sexual decadence shocking in the later stages of Victorian Europe. Elysee and I decided we were "museumed out" and chose instead to visit The Hofburg Palace, home to the Hapsburgs for 600 years and their summer palace Schloss Schounbrunn. The Schounbrunn was a favorite of Empress Maria Teresa and a temporary home to Napoleon twice during his campaigns against Austria in 1805 and 1809. The Schounbrun is also where the last Hapsburg Emperor, Charles I, abdicated in 1918 at the end of WWI bringing to close the last chapter of Hapsburg rule in Europe.If you visit the Schounbrun I recommend you do so individually and not on a tour. It is vast and well equipped with headsets providing abundant information for a self-guided tour. Two interesting facts about the palace is that it is the first zoological garden in Europe and was also the site of the meeting with Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1961, where the Soviet leader took the measure of the young President and decided he was too inexperienced; this false reading led to the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War's most precipitous and dangerous confrontation. I had visited the palace many years before and was impressed with the stables, a place not included in the regular tour that mostly concentrates of the Hapsburg's living arrangements. It is a significant collection of imperial transportation including grand state coaches, funeral wagons, children's wagons and adult and children's sleighs. The most ornate coach, a "Baroque on Wheels" as Elysee named it, was built for Empress Maria Teresa in 1765, covered with gold ornamentation and needing eight horses to pull it along.
