Hofburg:
The wing of the Hofburg overlooking the Michaelerplatz was built, on designs made around 1730 by Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Eralch for the emperor Charles VI, only under the emperor Franz Joseph, and completed around 1895. The façade, therefore, never became familiar to Elisabeth.
At the Hofburg, the Empress Elisabeth lived in the so-called apartments of Alexander in the Amalienhof. They had been fusnished in the middle of the 18th century , but the furnishings were continually renewed, and this was also done in 1856/57 for the newly-wed imperial couple. In the saloon and bedroom of the empress we see in the background the iron bed which was taken into the room in the evening.
The former toilette, due to the presence of sports training equipment, is today also called the “gymnastics room”. Here we can also see paintings of her beloved circus horses and some of her dogs.
Schonbrunn:
Schonbrunn, built around 1700 on a design by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach for the emperor Joseph I and modified under Maria Theresa by Nikolaus Pacassi, was the imperial family’s summer residence. Franz Joseph was born here in 1830, and here in 1916 he died. View of the central wing of the façade overlooking the garden, with the northern outskirts of Vienna in the background.
The villa of Hermes:
In 1882, the celebrated architect Carl von Hasenauer – who in those years had been busy on the building of two imperial museums on the Ringstrasse and on the enlargement of the Hofburg – received from the emperor the commission to build for Elisabeth, in the Imperial hunting reserve of Lainz near Vienna, a formal villa which responded more to her personal taste than to that of the poetic empress.
However the pictorial decoration reflected her tastes at least as much as the subjects. Elisabeth’s favourite play was Shakespear’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in her poems and letters she had several times indentified herself with the fairy queen Titania. In every castle she lived in she wanted an image of Titania with the ass, something she justified with self-critical spirit, declaring that she “Never tired of looking at the ass’s head of our sentiments, which we fondle without respite”. Elisabeth also purchased paintings in later years, for example for the Villa of Hermes Venetian motifs, following more the romantic predilections of her Wittelsbach cousin kind Ludwig II of Bavaria than the official taste of Franz Joseph.
The neo-Baroque building was at first supposed to be named “Villa Waldruh”, but later, from a marble statue of Hermes by Ernst Heter, it was called the Villa of Hermes. From 1866 the empress regularly spent many weeks of the year there, until 1891 when the Achilleion of Corfu, executed according to her wishes and to her ideas, became for a short time her favourite residence.
The Achilleion of Corfu:
Elisabeth had visited Corfu for the first time in 1861, not yet twenty-three years old. From this time on she was very fond of the island and visited it frequently, often stopping off on her travels in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. She took intensive lessons in ancient and modern Greek with various teachers, some extremely erudite, one of whom, the young Constantine Christomanos, left pages of a diary that reveal much about Elisabeth’s thoughts and feelings. But her most important mentor was the Austrian consul in Corfu, Alexander von Warsberg, one of the greatest experts on Greece and its history, who also assumed responsibility for the initial designs of the Achilleion. From 1888 Elisabeth had set her mind on building a palace on the island that was completed in 1891, and which even today is resplendent with seductive beauty. In the park the empress had a statue of the dying Achilles erected, as well as a small temple to her favourite poet, Heinrich Heine. However, almost as soon as the Achilleion was finished, Elisabeth lost all interest in it. She stayed there for the last time in April 1896.
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