- 4/17/2025
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00:00Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth.
00:09Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best.
00:18Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered.
00:25Infamous monarchs from history and the artists, designers and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality.
00:36These are the most opulent, flamboyant and innovative royal residences around the world.
00:44This time, the home of one of the world's most powerful royal dynasties, the Habsburgs.
00:51At their peak, the imperial family's branches spread across central Europe.
00:56And for 350 years, Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria was their main summer residence.
01:02Its 1,441 rooms have played host to some of Europe's most influential figures and events.
01:10Making Schönbrunn one of the world's greatest palaces.
01:14Marie Antoinette, Mozart and Napoleon Bonaparte.
01:32Just a few of the famous names who have walked the corridors of this breathtaking building.
01:37Starting life as a hunting lodge, after a major renovation, Schönbrunn Palace became the home of the Habsburg monarchy between 1569 and 1918.
01:57Bobby Titmarsh moved from the UK to Vienna over three decades ago and has never looked back.
02:04Schönbrunn is, for me, my life.
02:08I started to work in Schönbrunn in 1974 basically as a guide.
02:13So I've seen the paintings from the front, from the back, from the side.
02:17I know where the cobwebs are.
02:19I know Schönbrunn inside out.
02:22And it's become my home to a certain extent.
02:26It's just become part of my life.
02:29And for me, definitely something special.
02:32Schönbrunn holds many engineering secrets.
02:35In 1744, architect Nicolaus Bukassi turned the former hunting lodge into a palace fit for royalty by designing a clever way of keeping the servants separate from the imperial family.
02:48In this room, you can see one of the largest stoves in Schönbrunn.
02:57All of the stoves were stoked from the other side.
03:00To stoke the stoves, the servants would have had to go through that door or through doors like this into the corridor to get to the back of the stove.
03:12And those corridors were used by the servants so that they could do their work.
03:18But they were also used by members of the imperial family so that they could bypass the rooms.
03:24So if the emperor was standing in one of these rooms, you wouldn't be able to walk through the room.
03:30Even if you were the crown prince, you would have to bypass the room by using the doors on the left-hand side.
03:39I like to compare the system that we've got to that in England.
03:45In the stately homes in England, you have a system of upstairs and downstairs.
03:50So the family lived in the rooms on the first floor or second floor, whereas the servants were in the basement below.
04:00In Schönbrunn, we've got the same system, but we've got inside and outside.
04:05All of the rooms that were used by the imperial family have got their windows on the outside of the building,
04:12whereas the rooms and the corridors on the inside of the building have got their windows on the inner courtyards.
04:20So all of the work was done on the other side of these walls, and the family was completely undisturbed.
04:30Bobby knows all about Schönbrunn's long history.
04:35The palace itself dates way back into the 16th century.
04:39It used to be a hunting lodge, and it wasn't called Schönbrunn originally.
04:43It was called the Katerburg.
04:45There is a legend connected with that building, the emperor Matthias.
04:52He reigned during the 16th century.
04:55It's said to have gone hunting in the Vienna woods, and he found a small natural spring,
05:00and tasted the water of the spring, and said in German,
05:03My, this is about a schönes Wasser, a schöne Brunnen, a beautiful spring.
05:09And that spring gave this palace that was later built its name.
05:14The imperial family who ruled over Austria at the time were the Habsburgs.
05:21Their lineage goes back to the 11th century.
05:26The Habsburgs are one of the oldest royal families in Europe.
05:29They're incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy.
05:32At one point, really, they were seen as the greatest royal family in Europe.
05:36So what the Habsburgs wanted, the Habsburgs got.
05:40They start off in Switzerland as Counts of Habsburg in 1020.
05:47And by 1276, they're ruling Austria.
05:52They're very powerful.
05:53They always used to say,
05:55The House of Austria never declares war.
05:59It always marries heiresses.
06:01This was part of a process that we call dynasticism,
06:04whereby the power and the marriage network was very important.
06:09And they were, as a dynasty, obviously vastly influential.
06:16The original hunting lodge was destroyed by Turkish invaders
06:21during their unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683.
06:26Ten years later, an unknown Austrian architect named Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach
06:32was asked to rebuild Schundrun, but little is known of his final design.
06:41We don't know very much about this palace.
06:44It was unfortunately not finished.
06:47I mean, it was finished in the constructive part.
06:51It was built.
06:52It had a flat roof because this was the Italian style, but not proper for our climate.
06:59It was just in hunting lodge, but in the dimensions, which is now the dimensions of the Schundrun Palace.
07:06Schundrun would remain incomplete until Emperor Charles VI gifted it as a wedding present to his daughter,
07:14the future Empress Maria Theresa.
07:17When Charles VI died, she came very often here.
07:23She had already the family with her children.
07:26And then she decided in 1744 to remodel and to reconstruct the palace
07:34towards a really summer residence with all the needs,
07:40with all the ceremonial needs and the purpose to stay here with her family.
07:47And so this was the time when Schundrun Palace became this what it is nowadays,
07:54with all the buildings beside, to host all the functions and the offices of the court.
08:00It had to host something like 1,000 to 1,500 people here.
08:05So she needed a big place to cover all the needs.
08:10Maria Theresa's feeling towards Schundrun developed when she was a child.
08:16This was still a hunting lodge.
08:18And the imperial family would have come to this building to go hunting in the Vienna woods.
08:23And she would have spent her childhood years in Schundrun.
08:28But she was fond of the building.
08:31If it wasn't for Maria Theresa, Schundrun would never have become what it is today.
08:37To make her vision a reality,
08:40Empress Maria Theresa turned to Italian-Austrian architect, Nicolaus Percassi.
08:47He's so incredibly important in Schundrun's history because he largely gave us the Schundrun Palace that we know today.
08:56It was such a huge project and the process of renovation meant the palace itself had to be extended, indeed enlarged.
09:05And he was largely responsible for this.
09:09The only record that we have is that Maria Theresa's mentioned in a letter to somebody, I don't remember, that Percassi is an architect who understands her ideas and he knows to realize it.
09:26We can figure out that he was learning by doing.
09:31When he dismantled the inside in the middle, the ground floor, it must have been a big risk that not everything is falling down.
09:42Because he took all the walls out to make a passage from the courtyard to the garden.
09:49So it was quite risky what he did.
09:52The original building only had two floors.
09:56As you can see, this building has got three floors.
09:59And Maria Theresa had everything changed.
10:02The height of the rooms on the main floor was approximately eight meters.
10:07By reducing this to five meters, Percassi was able to insert an entire floor to Schundrun without modifying the external structure of the building.
10:17And the central part of the palace has not got those rooms.
10:21And that's where the ballroom is.
10:23And the ballroom is the original house.
10:29Architect Percassi's plans for Schundrun included 1,441 rooms in the 175 meter wide symmetrical palace.
10:40He was influenced by a new style that was sweeping Europe in the middle of the 18th century.
10:46The palace interiors are mainly in the Rococo style.
10:52It's the style which was developed in the Maria Theresian epoch.
10:57It's the style of her period.
10:59And you can see it all over in the rooms.
11:02This is very typical for the period for Rococo.
11:07Light, lively and asymmetrical.
11:10It's nearly the opposite to Baroque.
11:14Baroque is always very heavy, symmetrical and dark.
11:19All of the designs that you can see are asymmetrical.
11:23Whereas if this was a Baroque room, you would be able to slice everything into two halves and it would fit together.
11:30That can't be done here.
11:32It does actually look quite tasteful to us now in our age of kitsch.
11:36It looks very beautiful.
11:37But then it was really excess.
11:40It was really a big statement with its sort of extra ornamentation, extra decoration.
11:46It was just perfect for a palace because everything about it said,
11:50I am the greatest, I am the emperor and bow down in front of me.
11:53So it was really a high expression of huge amounts of money.
11:59It was meant to awe the eye.
12:02Maria Theresa was also a formidable woman on the political scene.
12:08During her 40-year reign as empress, she made many reforms across the Austrian Empire, providing education for the lower classes and modernizing the judicial system.
12:23Maria Theresa was really Europe's mother-in-law, but she had 16 children and 56 grandchildren, not all of which survived.
12:34And so she really was at the pinnacle of a huge network of family that was underpinned by political marriages.
12:43Maria Theresa was an incredibly powerful matriarch.
12:47In a time of great matriarchs, she was the most powerful.
12:51She was intelligent.
12:53She was determined.
12:54She was an incredible political power player.
12:57She was an absolutely indomitable woman.
13:00You would never, ever want to say no to her.
13:03She was, I think, the greatest empress.
13:06She was an extremely strong woman that would not give way.
13:12She was of the opinion that God gave her the rights that she had.
13:19And only God can take those rights away from her.
13:23These are the lands that she was entitled to.
13:26And she defended those lands with everything that she had.
13:31She tried to make new alliances with other countries in Europe.
13:37Maria Theresa wants to extend her power through Europe, through her children.
13:42And she was incredibly effective at marrying her children into the greatest royal families of Europe.
13:48It was all the Habsburg spin, the Habsburg propaganda.
13:51The one we remember most of her children is Marie Antoinette, who married into the French royal family.
13:57And we always see her as this great French princess.
14:00But when she was hated during the French Revolution, they called her the Austrian, the Austrian princess.
14:05They're obsessed with her being a foreigner.
14:07And Marie Antoinette, that was an amazing coup for her.
14:11She had married in to the French royal family.
14:14She was a future queen of France.
14:16Marie Antoinette has gone down in history as the epitome of French aristocracy during the country's bloody revolution of 1789.
14:28But she began her life at Schönbrunn as a little girl named Maria Antonia.
14:34Over here you can see Maria Theresa's second youngest child.
14:39Her name was Maria Antonia, better known as Marie Antoinette.
14:44She married the King of France through the 16th and was beheaded on the guillotine in 1793 during the French Revolution.
14:53Marie Antoinette remained stoic up until the very end.
14:59The strength of her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, seemed to be imparted in all 11 of her daughters.
15:08All of the daughters of Maria Theresa, except Marie Christine, they almost haven't seen their husbands before the marriage.
15:16They just had paintings, portraits of them, to have an idea what their future husband is looking like.
15:25There is a sentence documented of Marie Caroline, who was married with the King of Naples.
15:34And when she met him, she wrote in a letter, I was surprised.
15:38He was less ugly as I supposed, but more stupid than he should be.
15:46One of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Francis Stephen of Lorraine's additions to the grounds of the palace is now one of Vienna's most popular attractions with over 2 million visitors per year.
16:01Gerhard Heindl has worked at Schönbrunn Zoo for over 20 years.
16:07So we are now in the heart of Schönbrunn Zoo in the central pavilion.
16:12It's part of the baroque architecture we have in the zoo dating back to 1752, including some of the old animal houses in the administration building.
16:23But this is the very heart of Schönbrunn Zoo.
16:26This is the place where the emperors have been to watch the animals and where they celebrated some family affairs.
16:34The zoo was the brainchild of Francis Stephen, who wanted it to be a symbol of the Habsburg power and wealth.
16:44It was state of the art.
16:46In the first half and until the second half of the 18th century, it was a must have.
16:53It was a representative thing.
16:55The Habsburgans were one of the ruling dynasties of Europe and they had to have something.
17:01We don't know really what kind of animals were there, but in literature it's transported that it were mostly water birds or other birds.
17:16We think that once Stephen and his wife also must have had monkeys and parrots and something like this.
17:25Then we know about sheep and goats, exotic ones, also deer and also a reindeer.
17:33And it wasn't just animals that Maria Theresa and Francis Stephen were interested in.
17:44The gardens at Schönbrunn were full of exotic plants and trees from around the world.
17:50When it came to building a winter home for the rare flora, the empress once again turned to architect Nicolaus Bacassi.
17:57The result was the impressive orangery, which is now managed by Peter Hozek.
18:03The orangery was finished around 1756 because the empress Maria Theresa wanted to have a storage for these wonderful plants that they collected all over the world within the years.
18:16And they wanted to have a storage area and they also wanted to have a heatable storage area because the plants would otherwise die when they stay outside of the winter.
18:26So they built this wonderful building, which is one of the longest, actually I think it's their longest orangery with a 189 meter length.
18:36It's a fantastic architectural building.
18:39The huge orangery uses an ancient central heating design known as Hippocorst.
18:46It's a system that dates back to 350 BC.
18:51It works by burning wood in a furnace under the floor and then allowing the hot air to rise through hollow bricks in the walls.
19:04This ensures the temperature inside the orangery is perfect for plants during the harsh Vienna winters.
19:11First of all, of course, this wonderful heating system that I'm sitting on right now, which is the Hippocorst heating system, which you know from the Romans.
19:19And this system is installed here back then and still operating and still working and still in use these days.
19:26As you can see, it's quite cold in here.
19:29So when it freezes outside, they put all the woods that they collect in the park still up to this day and put it in this heating system to heat up the whole room.
19:40In the wintertime, it can have up to 14, 15 degrees Celsius here.
19:45It's fresh, it's crisp, it's a lot of oxygen, a little humidity and it's just nice.
19:52The Orangery now hosts daily classical concerts, where the Schundbrem Palace Orchestra perform the music of one of Austria's most famous sons, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
20:09The child protege first performed here in 1762 and will always be linked with the palace.
20:18Mozart's father, Leopold Mozart, was very conscious of his son.
20:24He was very knowledgeable of music at the young age of five or six years.
20:30And Leopold then took his son to different cities in Europe and introduced his son to members of the royal families.
20:41And one of those families was the imperial family in Vienna.
20:46Maria Theresia and her husband Francis Stephen of Lorraine.
20:51And a concert took place in the so-called mirror room in Schönbrunn in 1762.
20:58He was playing the hapsichord for the Empress and his father, Leopold, presented him as the Wunderkind.
21:05Young Mozart was a hit with the imperial family.
21:09They took the place by storm.
21:11Maria Theresia clapped and clapped.
21:13She picked him up and put him on her knee.
21:15Whereupon he reached up, put his arms around her neck and gave her a big kiss.
21:18This is the story.
21:20We don't really know if it's true, but it's a cute little story.
21:23And I think we should keep this kind of story.
21:27Because I'm sure that a five-year-old kid would do something like that.
21:31Stories of Mozart's first performance at the palace have become folklore.
21:41Mozart is said to have tripped over as he went into the room.
21:45And he fell to the floor.
21:47And the imperial family was sitting on the other side of the room, watching, waiting for the musicians to start.
21:54And little Marie Antoinette, she was only about two years older than Mozart, she ran over and then picked him up.
22:02Which is something that's a no-go.
22:04That's something that members of the imperial family would never do, should never do.
22:09But that young, say eight-year-old Marie Antoinette helped Mozart to his feet.
22:17And this little boy then turned around and said, you're so sweet.
22:21When I get older, I'd like to marry you.
22:23And I think that would have been better for both of them.
22:27It's an amazing moment of history when you think that Mozart would have met Marie Antoinette there.
22:31What must they have thought of each other?
22:34And, obviously, she would just be a face in the crowd to him.
22:38But two of them to go on to have these great, incredible lives.
22:43Arguably, we might say, two of the most famous people of 18th century Europe were there together in the same room,
22:51listening to Mozart play and be such a musical genius.
22:56240 years after Mozart first played at the palace, another famous face performed in the Orangery.
23:06In 2001, former US President Bill Clinton was attending a gala event at Schönbrunn.
23:13So it was a dinner, and after the dinner, there was a jazz band playing.
23:18One guy from the American company came to me and said, can Mr. President play?
23:23And I personally picked the saxophone and put it in a corner. It was ready.
23:27And then I went to him and said, Mr. President, would you like to play with the band?
23:30And he looked at me and he couldn't believe it and said, well, do you have a saxophone?
23:33He said, sure.
23:34But was the 42nd President of the United States in the same musical league as Mozart?
23:40He was fantastic. He did a really, really good job. He played for like 45 minutes.
23:45So for us, it was a big thing because we made pictures and it was in the newspaper everywhere.
23:55Hosting political dignitaries at Schönbrunn was also essential for the Habsburgs in the 18th century.
24:01During Maria Theresa's reign, Austria's allegiance with France held great importance.
24:08The two countries allied during the Seven Years' War, which was being fought across Europe between 1756 and 1763.
24:18Victory for Austria over Prussia at the Battle of Collin in 1757 led to the building of one of Schönbrunn's most beautiful structures, the Gloriette.
24:30The impressive monument was designed by local architect Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg in 1772.
24:39Stood atop a 60 meter high hill, the imposing Gloriette took three years to build and is considered the first classical style building in Austria.
24:50We're at the top of the hill, so this used to be a part of the Vienna woods.
24:55But when the Gloriette was built, the top of the hill was flattened and they started to build the Gloriette.
25:02And it was finished in 1775.
25:05But it was built to commemorate Austria's victory at the Battle of Collin, so a type of an Arc de Triomphe.
25:14Part of the Gloriette was destroyed by the Allied forces during the Second World War and restored soon after in 1947.
25:22There were two air raids, one in October 1944, and the second air raid was in February 1945.
25:31And in February 1945 they were trying to hit the military installation that was built in 1938 by the German Third Reich.
25:41Some of the bombs fell short of their target, or most of the bombs fell short of their target, and 270 bombs landed in the grounds of Schönbrunn.
25:51One bomb hit the main building, then one bomb hit the left-hand side of the Gloriette, and completely destroyed one third of the Gloriette.
26:00So if you're talking about the left-hand side of this building, that's new.
26:04If you're talking about the right-hand side, then these are the old decorations.
26:08Just five years after the Gloriette was originally finished in 1775, so was Maria Theresa's reign at Schönbrunn.
26:15She died in 1780. She was only 63 years of age.
26:20But after contracting smallpox in 1762, she deteriorated.
26:28She became very big. She couldn't move.
26:32She needed to be carried back and forth in a sedan chair.
26:37They even lifted her from one floor to the other.
26:41She couldn't climb stairs.
26:43But she would have seen this building for the last five years of her life, definitely.
26:47She was proud.
26:49She'd made an achievement.
26:51She'd created a majestic complex that showed what power she had and how mighty she was.
27:00Schönbrunn symbolizes the might of the Habsburg Empire.
27:05By 1793, relations between France and Austria had soured.
27:17Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799 after the fallout from the French Revolution and was intent on conquering Europe.
27:27The Napoleonic Wars were a problem for Austria and a problem for Schönbrunn as time went on.
27:35The Austrians won a major battle near Vienna, the Battle of Aspern, but they lost a major battle shortly afterwards, the so-called Battle of Wagram.
27:45And that led to Vienna being occupied by the French.
27:49And the Austrian Emperor was obliged to let Napoleon use half of the palace as his residence, so to speak.
27:59So Maria Theresia's rooms, the 18th century rooms at the back of the palace, virtually the best rooms that we've got, were used by Napoleon.
28:09The Emperor Francis I of Austria had a cunning strategy to broker a peace deal with the diminutive general.
28:19He married off his daughter to Napoleon.
28:23Napoleon's second wife was Maria Luisa, which brought him a little bit of help from his son-in-law, virtually.
28:31His son-in-law wouldn't harm him as much as what he would have done had he not given his daughter in marriage to the French Emperor.
28:44In the Habsburg family, there was already this tradition to make compromises, to make marriages that brings you together maybe even with your enemies.
28:56I mean, this is a tradition that Maria Theresia followed and her priestesses followed.
29:02So marrying was just always a political strategy of the Habsburg monarch.
29:12This was Napoleon's study. This is where Napoleon worked in 1805 and again in 1809.
29:19The people that came to see the French Emperor came into that room where they would have been able to speak to the Emperor.
29:27But if the Emperor wanted them to go to his study, they would have been here in this room.
29:32This is for instance where the Treaty of Chambron was signed in 1809.
29:36After the signing of the treaty, where France imposed harsh diplomatic sanctions on Vienna, Napoleon was conducting drills in the grounds of the palace.
29:48Watching on was a disgruntled civilian with murder on his mind.
29:52Friedrich Stabbs was a German and he did not like the idea of being occupied by France.
30:00And he thought the best way to get rid of the threat to Germany would be to kill the Emperor.
30:06So he was standing in the courtyard of Chambron with a roll of paper.
30:11And in the roll of paper, he hid a dagger.
30:15And then marched towards the Emperor and saying,
30:18Your Majesty, Your Majesty, I'd like to show you my petition.
30:23And then the officers stopped him shortly before he got close to the Emperor and found the dagger.
30:28He was brought to the study where Napoleon was in Inchenbronn.
30:36And Napoleon is said to have asked Friedrich Stabbs,
30:40If I forgive you for what you've done, what would you do?
30:44And Friedrich Stabbs said, If I have the chance, then I'd kill you.
30:49And that was definitely the end.
30:52He was taken and then the firing squad did everything else.
31:02It was an act of defiance that could have changed the course of history across Europe.
31:08Shumbun is the site of a great what-if in history.
31:11And the what-if is what if Napoleon died.
31:14The great Napoleon would have been executed in everything we know about French history,
31:19about Napoleon's war with the entirety of Europe would have been changed.
31:31By 1848, Napoleon had been defeated and Austria had a new Emperor, Franz Joseph I.
31:39He chose Schönbrunn as his favorite residence and shared the palace with his wife,
31:44Empress Elizabeth of Austria, known affectionately as Sisi.
31:50Often compared to Princess Diana, Sisi became a popular figure across Austria and Hungary.
31:57Olivia Lichtscheidel is the curator of a museum at Vienna's Hofburg Palace dedicated to the former Empress.
32:05Sisi was very special.
32:06I think she was so different in her time.
32:10She was emancipated.
32:11She was strong.
32:13She was shy.
32:14She was lovely, but she criticized a lot.
32:19So maybe it's this difference in her character between an easy person and a difficult person that makes her so interesting.
32:30Sisi was just a teenager when she arrived at Schönbrunn.
32:35Sisi was a little princess of Bavaria, but she was the cousin of the Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph.
32:42And when he fell in love with her, so she got the chance to have this love match.
32:48And she came here when she was only 15.
32:50As a bride, she had to come before to Schönbrunn Palace, so she arrived here and everything was strange.
32:58She didn't know where to go, what to do.
33:01This was very, very difficult for her.
33:04When she did marry Franz Joseph, she wrote only two weeks after the wedding in a poem that's very poignant,
33:12freedom thou hast turned from me, and she felt as if she'd become completely bound by the position.
33:21But as her mother, Ludovica, said, one does not send the Emperor of Austria packing.
33:27So she really didn't have much choice.
33:28And I think the fact that she made this incredible marriage to what really was the most eligible royal bachelor of the 19th century surprised her more than it did anyone else.
33:43One of the lasting legacies from Franz Joseph and Sisi's time at Schönbrunn is the magnificent Palm House, the home to the Imperial Botanical Collection.
33:54Daniel Rohauer has been the head gardener at Schönbrunn for 15 years.
34:03The plans to build the Palm House were started around 1860, when the old greenhouses were rotten down so heavily that they needed to be rebuilt.
34:13And then it took quite long to make the Caesar Franz Joseph invest the money.
34:18We know about 15 sketches, different ways how to design the Palm House.
34:24And all 15 were presented to the Caesar, and the Caesar said, no, I don't like this, I want it a bit different.
34:31Franz Joseph finally decided that if he was going to build a Palm House, it would be the biggest and the best.
34:38In 1855, the Bessemer process had revolutionized steel production.
34:45It was now cheaper and available in larger quantities.
34:49Architect Franz Segenschmidt chose to use steel instead of iron when designing the state-of-the-art structure.
34:55He's a Wienese local. He also worked then on and cooperated a lot with railways.
35:04He made many railway bridges and he knew how to work with this new material with steel, because not many people were skilled in this.
35:12He did his job very properly.
35:13And the very special architectural way he found, and this is also why our Palm House, first it was built 50 years later than the Kew Garden Palm House, looks a bit lighter.
35:26Is that all the carrying massive iron construction is put outside.
35:31So it is like a frame around and the glass construction is hung into it.
35:35The work on the Palm House took two years and 30 million Gulden were invested.
35:43This was quite a lot of money for this time, but still less than the architect thought that it would cost.
35:51The 113 meter long and 28 meter high Palm House took two years to build and opened in 1882.
35:59One hundred years later, modern day engineering attempts to improve Sagan Schmidt's design were unsuccessful.
36:09In the original building, there were airing openings in the wall.
36:13And in the 1980s, they were closed because they said like cold air from outside comes in.
36:18But now we know that it was an airing for the glasses, that there is not so much condensed water that is dropping down.
36:25And a few years ago, there was a special airing system installed.
36:31This has a special filter and in the original building, it was just an opening slit in the wall where the air thrives through and up the glass and did it.
36:42And in the 80s, they really thought that they know everything and did quite some mistakes.
36:47The emperor behind the Palm House, Franz Joseph and his wife Cece, had four children together, three daughters and one son.
36:58The heir to the throne, Rudolf, born in 1858.
37:02The crown prince, Rudolf, was a person with a lot of fantasy.
37:10He was a liberal thinking person.
37:13And for the court in Vienna, he was, as we call, a persona non grata.
37:18So nobody wanted him to influence politics.
37:21Then his wedding was not very happy with Stephanie from Belgium.
37:25He had a daughter with her, but it was not the big laugh.
37:29So he used drugs.
37:31He had lots of mistresses.
37:33And all that led to a terrible tragedy, what we call the tragedy of Meyerling, where he committed suicide and killed the young mistress, Marie Vecherer.
37:44So that was something terrible for the Catholic court here, you have to imagine that.
37:49The murder committed by Rudolf and his subsequent suicide on the same fateful night, the 30th of January, 1889, was devastating for Cece and Franz Joseph.
38:03Cece was very strong in that time, and she was the first one who got the information.
38:10And she was the one that gave the terrible news to Franz Joseph.
38:14And she was the one that supported Franz Joseph in the first days, weeks.
38:21And the moment he started to work again and to have his normal life, she started to travel.
38:28That was her way to come over this terrible tragedy.
38:32She started to travel a lot after Rudolf's death because she said, when I'm away, then I'm on one side alone.
38:39And on the other side, I can go where I want to go and I can meet only the people I want to meet, and I can think about lots of things.
38:50Her travels took the 61-year-old Cece and her lady-in-waiting to Switzerland in 1898.
38:58She would never return to Schönbrunn again.
39:00Sissi was in Geneva, and she had no bodyguards in that moment because she often refused to have them, thinking that she was not important.
39:12She's not doing politics, she's a woman, defenseless, nothing will happen.
39:16But in Geneva, there was Luigi Lucchini, a young Italian, who had a terrible life before.
39:25He suffered because he was poor, and he wanted to make a sign against rich people.
39:33He observed both women because she and her court lady were dressed in black, and he didn't know who is now Sissi.
39:41Who is now Sissi? The left one, the right one? So he looked at them, he watched them.
39:46And when he knew who Sissi was, then he ran to her with a pile, and he really made it with a strong push in her heart.
39:57And then they brought her back to the hotel, Hotel Bourrivage, where she died.
40:15So it was very tragic end. I think it almost broke the poor old emperor, a son committing suicide, and a wife stabbed to death.
40:25The Austro-Hungarian Empire mourned for their beloved Sissi.
40:32Thousands turned out to see her funeral cortege on the 17th of September, 1898.
40:40People compare her to Diana because of the problems she had on court, because of all the critics here.
40:48Diana died very young, very young in the accident.
40:51In the accident, Sissi was assassinated. And in the end, this is what made her really be a myth today.
40:59Nobody knew her when she was older. But in the end, the last moment to make really a myth out of Sissi was her assassination.
41:09It was the death of Sissi's son, Crown Prince Rudolf, that set off a chain of events that would eventually put an end to the Austrian imperial family.
41:20Emperor Franz Joseph had lost his direct successor. His brother, Karl Ludwig, died in 1806, and his nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was killed in Sarajevo, which signaled the beginning of the First World War.
41:38When Franz Joseph died on the 21st of November, 1916, his great nephew, Karl the First, and wife Sita, became the last emperor and empress to live at Schönbrunn Palace.
41:53Karl relinquished participation in the administration of the state on Armistice Day, the 11th of November, 1918.
42:03You can't talk about an end of a dynasty with Karl. You can't talk about the end of the monarchy here, because Karl and Sita had to leave Vienna then, because they were asked to participate in the parliament as politicians, but they said, no, that's impossible.
42:21So they officially never abdicated. Therefore, they had to leave Austria. And Karl died in Madeira.
42:28One hundred years after the death of the final Habsburg emperor, the palace lives on as a museum, which has been open to the public since the 1960s.
42:38Even in the modern world, the scale and the might of Schönbrunn and its 500-acre grounds continue to amaze people from around the globe.
42:48Schönbrunn is definitely one of the most beautiful palaces in Europe. In my opinion, you've got millions of visitors that go through the rims and it's getting more and more and more as the years go by.
43:05Schönbrunn is one of the best preserved Habsburg palaces and preserved in the way that you can still feel the time of Maria Theresa. It's very authentic.
43:22That's what people say when they come to Schönbrunn palace, that they have the feeling that the emperor's left it only some days ago. So we try to make it very familiar.
43:32We often forget how powerful and important the Habsburgs were. And when you go to Schönbrunn, you see how they were so powerful, so feared and no one ever thought that their great reign, their great power would ever end.
43:49And so Schönbrunn to me is both an amazing representation of the Habsburgs and their great power, and also a reminder that power never lasts.
44:19The Habsburgs and their great power never lasts.
44:22The Habsburgs are the way that they're using the cartwheel on the bottom of the front.
44:28So I'm at the beginning of the house, where they start to see the nature of the world.
44:32I'm at the beginning of the house.
44:36I'm at the beginning of the house.
44:38I'm at the beginning of the house.
44:40We have the beginning of this house.
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