So Much Sisi
The Carriage Museum That's 99% Sisi
After how horrible and devastating yesterday was, I needed a break and a laugh today. Thankfully, I got both. I started the day after class with a box of takeaway carbonara from Popez, a beautiful Italian food window near Mariahilfer Strasse. Unlike most service workers in Vienna, the man working at the window was ridiculously friendly. He gave me recommendations, asked about my life, wanted to know more about UC Davis, and seemed generally super duper nice which was a rare change of pace from the typical Austrian unfriendliness. After that, I headed to Schonbrunn to visit the Carriage Museum with a couple of friends.
In 1853, a young Emperor Franz Joseph got engaged to Elisabeth, the woman pictured, when she was just 16. Despite the fact that he was 23 and meant to marry her older sister Helene, the world was enthralled in their fairy tale romance. Elisabeth or, as she was more commonly known, Sisi, became the darling of the masses. Much like Princess Diana Spencer of the United Kingdom would go on to do, she had created a cult around her of deeply devoted fans, often to her detriment. She was assassinated by an anarchist in 1898 turning an already famous once-in-a-generation beauty into a martyr for the country.
Because of this story, her legacy has persevered, perhaps a little too well, into the present day. You see, Sisi may have been beautiful and interesting to the masses she traveled to see, her personal life was no doubt interesting, but in terms of political impact she's a far less important Empress than Maria Theresia and the prominence that is given to her in museums here feels somewhat unearned.
I don't have anything against Sisi, per se, but every Viennese museum, monument, and tourist destination will not shut up about her. The biggest culprit? The very museum I was in today.
For example, this is a carriage used by Napoleon Bonaparte during his coronation as King of Italy in 1805. After Napoleon's defeat at the hands of Austrian Emperor Francis I (who is also Holy Roman Emperor Francis II in a confusing twist), Francis took it and redecorated it with Austrian iconography. All of this is in one small paragraph at the museum. Following that are two much longer paragraphs explaining the time Sisi made her solemn entry to her wedding in the carriage, got her diadem caught on the doorway, stumbled, and then sobbed in her new home because of how embarrassed she was.
This clearly was not Sisi or the carriage's finest moment but is the one most immortalized in this museum solely because it's her one connection to the vehicle. This carriage was literally used to bring one of the most recognizable and important historical figures ever to his coronation as the King of Italy but that, apparently, matters less than that one time Sisi tripped.
The rest of the carriage museum follows a similar pattern to an almost comical extent. In a museum, ostensibly, dedicated to the carriages of the Habsburg family was a display containing this dress which belonged to Sisi.
Accompanying that was an explanation of why the dress looks so extremely uncomfortable around her internal organs. Apparently, Sisi had an extreme obsession with slenderness and youthful beauty. Before she had even turned 40 she hid her face with a veil or a fan and refused to sit for portraits or photographs. This developed into a myth that she, like Diana, was murdered when she was still very young despite the fact that she was already 60. Once again, while this interesting, I truly do not see what it has to do with carriages nor do I understand why it is here. At the carriage museum.
This carriage, thankfully, has more descriptors that do not involve Sisi. This is the Imperial Carriage and was, by far, the most elegant carriage in the Imperial Court at Vienna. Built in 1735, it was painted nearly 30 years later in 1763 by Franz Xaver Wagenschōn and was only brought out for important events such as coronations, weddings, and solemn entries.
Don't worry though, in case you were concerned, Sisi used this literally one time to take her to Budapest in 1867 for her Hungarian coronation. If that wasn't enough Sisi for you and focused too much on people that weren't her, just head upstairs.
This is one of Sisi's riding saddles and yes, it is in front of portraits of all 24 of her horses. The entire second floor is literally just about Sisi's horses. At the carriage museum. Sisi was a major horse girl and maintained a room called the Riding Chapel which was just decorated with paintings of horses. Only once you had proven yourself to be a true horse-lover would Sisi allow you to enter the Riding Chapel.
When we had finished on the Sisi floor, we walked back downstairs past a couple more carriages that she used once or saw once or something like that before winding up in front of one of my favorite things in this museum. This is the motorsports car of Ferdinand Habsburg.
Ferdinand Habsburg, a man I did not know existed until today, may be my favorite Habsburg. Born in 1997, Ferdinand the Fast, as I call him, is proclaimed in this museum as "The Fastest Habsburg," probably because engines didn't really exist for most of the time the Habsburgs mattered. Because of his name and his family's money he was able to buy the motorsports car and training and is now a candidate for Formula 1. Unfortunately, he is not a good one. Ferdinand the Fast's car, which is on display here, only ever hit a top speed of 143 mph which is around half the speed of the average Formula 1 race. That doesn't matter though, he is now a celebrity to the 3 of us that went to this museum and I root for this Nepo Baby in any race he's able to qualify for which is, admittedly, not many.
After the carriage museum, we walked around the Palmenhaus. The Palmenhaus, home to 4,500 different plant species is in a beautiful greenhouse that looks straight out of a movie. Inside it's beautiful and full of so many incredible plants. We spent a very long time wandering through the little alleyways and exploring new types of tree, flower, lily pad, and all sorts of other plants.
After all that happened yesterday, it was so nice to be immersed in this gorgeous natural beauty amidst such an incredible architectural achievement. Along with Kew Gardens and the Palmenhaus in Frankfurt, the Schonbrunn Palmenhaus is one of the 3 biggest plant houses of its type in the world. Walking around it, you can feel the scale. Being a regular visitor to the Golden Gate Park Conservatory of Flowers, a very similar structure in San Francisco, it was very apparent how much bigger the Palmenhaus was and how many more plants they were able to put into that space.
To cap the night off, I joined my friends at the Ottakringer Beer Festival. While there I got to try a couple different Ottakringer Beers and really enjoyed their Porter, a beer I've not been able to find anywhere else up to this point. I also got to watch a few of my friends do Beer Yoga, a hilarious event at the festival where a yoga instructor (speaking exclusively German) guided a crowd through an hour long yoga session that involved several moves where one of the instructions was to take a sip of the 3 beers provided to participants.
Yesterday may have been awful but I'm very grateful that today was absolutely the opposite.
