Vienna Hofburg - Imperial Apartments, Sisi Museum, Silver Collection

The dressing-cum-exercise room was the empress’s most important and at the same time most personal room and one where she spent most of her time. On the left you can see the empress’s dressing table where she sat for two to three hours a day while having her hair dressed. The empress utilised these hours for reading and learning foreign languages. Besides English and French Elisabeth also spoke perfect Hungarian. Above all, she loved Greek antiquity and mythology; on the small chair beside the dressing table sat her Greek Reader, Constantin Christomanos, who read extracts from Homer’s Iliad or Odyssee to Elisabeth while her hair was being elaborately dressed, or checked the Greek exercises completed by the empress, who was also learning Ancient and Modern Greek. Here in this room – to the horror and incomprehension of the court household – the empress also went through her daily exercise programme in order to preserve her slender figure and keep fit. Facing you are the wall bars