The hotel and the empress

You are standing in Weihburggasse, a minute from Kärntner Straße, outside a hotel named after a woman who spent most of her life avoiding this city.

Elisabeth of Austria, Sisi to almost everyone, came here in 1854 as a sixteen-year-old bride and left again whenever she could. Nearly everything that happened to her happened within the few streets around you. In the next hour we pass the church where she married, the crypt where she lies, the window where her jeweller still sells copies of the stars she wore in her hair, and the rooms where she exercised, read Homer and had her hair braided for three hours a day.

Eleven more stops, about two and a half kilometres, none of it outside the old city. Walk up to Stephansplatz. The cathedral is first, and it holds a piece of this family that almost every visitor walks straight past.