The stars in her hair

Number fifteen Neuer Markt, the shop with the diamond stars in the window. Those stars were designed right here, for the woman your hotel is named after.

Alexander Emanuel Köchert was court jeweller to Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known to everyone as Sisi. He made twenty-seven of these stars for her, each one small enough to pin into her hair on its own, or clipped together into a tiara. In the most famous portrait ever painted of her, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter in eighteen sixty-five, nine of them sit woven through her braids. That image has been on biscuit tins, chocolate boxes and film posters ever since.

In June nineteen ninety-eight, one of the original stars was on show at Schönbrunn Palace in a high-security case, part of an exhibition marking a hundred years since her death. A Canadian burglar lifted it out and left a replica in its place. For two weeks nobody noticed a thing. Then the star disappeared entirely.

Nine years later the man was arrested after a bank robbery in Canada. Police searched a house in Winnipeg and found the jewel, carefully kept. He had never sold it, because there is nowhere on earth to sell a star belonging to Sisi. That was exactly why he took it.

The original is now in the Sisi Museum, a few hundred yards from here inside the Hofburg palace. We walk past it later. The copies in this window, on the other hand, are simply for sale.