Three hours of hair

The long wing on your left is the Amalienburg. Elisabeth's private rooms were in there: a bedroom, two salons, and the room that gives her away, the combined dressing and exercise room.

She had rings and bars fitted in the doorway and wall bars along one side. Her mornings ran on exercises, cold baths and walks so long that the women of her household could not keep up.

And then the hair. It reached below her knees and took up to three hours a day to brush, braid and pin. Washing it, with egg and cognac, emptied a whole day from the calendar. Her hairdresser Fanny Feifalik earned more than a university professor and travelled everywhere with her. Hairs that came out had to be collected and shown in a silver bowl. She called the weight of it her crown, and she called herself its prisoner.

While her hair was being dressed she learned Hungarian, and later Greek, reading at a lectern so the hours would not be lost.

Franz Joseph lived through a different door. For most of the marriage she was somewhere else altogether: Madeira, Corfu, England, Hungary, anywhere but here.

Carry on through the next arch to the wide open square with the two bronze horsemen, and cross it towards the park on your right.