To see how royalty lived and to learn a little of the history of the Austrian imperial family, Schöbrunn is really a great place to visit. There is a lot to see in the rooms of the palace, and if you have time, there are other parts, such as a carriage museum, to tour also.

There are two levels of tickets available for the palace: One allows you to visit 22 rooms, and there is a more expensive grand tour that includes 40 rooms. They include hand-held audio guides so you can listen to commentary about the rooms and the imperial family. We were quite satisfied with the shorter tour. Plan on about an hour.

You can get into the gardens, but there is a separate admission for parts of the garden, such as the labyrinth and privy garden. Since we were there in March, those parts weren't open anyway. It was pleasant to just wander around the gardens, even though we were there too early for much to be in bloom.

We walked around the neighborhoods near the palace to look for a restaurant. We never did find anything very good, and wound up at a Chinese place serving a buffet. I recommend that you eat at the palace cafes or elsewhere in Vienna.

The palace has a good website at http://www.schoenbrunn.at
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The tour leads through a series of magnificent rococo rooms, all gilt and stucco against clean white walls; old furniture; embroidered curtains; huge mirrors; tapestried upholstery; massive ceramic stoves; and large paintings. Among the highlights are:

1. The Great Gallery, which is simply dazzling. It has crystal mirrors, a painted ceiling, striking stucco work- and two gilded wooden chandeliers that once held 70 candles each.
2. The wood-panelled Million Room, supposedly named so because it cost a million gold coins to decorate it. Amidst the stucco and wood panelling here are framed Mughal miniature paintings, making this one of the most unusual rooms in the palace.
3. The two Chinese Rooms, designed in keeping with the contemporary craze for Oriental patterns. Both have parquet floorings, and walls decorated with gold-on-black paintings in an Oriental style. The ceilings too are decorated in blue, white and gold, all worked in Chinese patterns.
4. The Hall of Mirrors, where Mozart, then aged six, gave one of his first performances before Maria Theresa. It’s recorded that when she praised him, the young musician "sprang onto the lap of the Empress, put his arms around her neck, and smothered her with kisses"!
5. The Ceremonial Hall, famous for its paintings depicting the wedding of Maria Theresa’s son, Josef II. The paintings are in amazingly fine detail- the one of the wedding banquet, for instance, actually contains details of patterns on crockery. The painting of the wedding, incidentally, shows a young Mozart amongst the congregation- although Mozart hadn’t been present; his picture was added at the Empress’s request.
6. The China Room, whose walls are covered with nearly 200 blueish pen-and-ink drawings, all of them supposedly made by the Emperor Franz Josef I and his children. If the imperial family did make them, I admire their skill: the drawings are very good indeed.

Besides these, there’s the Hunting Room, which contains lederhosen, hunting jacket and weapons once owned by Crown Prince Rudolf; the Billiards Room; the personal study and bedroom of Franz Josef I; and the bedroom, dressing room, and beauty care room of his wife, Sisi. The rooms, in fact, bring alive the contrasting characters of this strangely mismatched couple.

Schönbrunn opens daily at 8.30. Closing times vary from 4.30 onwards, with the palace remaining open till 6 in July and August.

The Grand Tour of the Schönbrunn interior involves 40 rooms, including the 22 seen on the Imperial Tour. It starts as the Imperial Tour, but in the Ceremony Hall, the majority of visitors head for the exit and things get significantly less crowded for those heading towards the apartments of Maria Theresa. The crowds deservedly miss the best part of the palace.

The Maria Theresa apartments are naturally older than those used by Kaiser Franz Ferdinand, with decorations generally the originals from the 18th century. Nowhere is the feminine touch of the female royals more visible than here, with some of the decorations actually painted by the princesses.

The first room of this tour is the blue Chinese Salon with hand-painted wallpaper. In this room, on November 11, 1918, Kaiser Karl relinquished all governmental power at the declaration of the Austrian Republic. However, he refused to relinquish his claim to the Austrian throne, and he, as well as the rest of the royal family, went into exile. (Only one princess gave up her very remote claims to the throne and was allowed to stay in Austria and keep her family fortune.)

The room with impressive black Japanese-lacquer wall paneling was dedicated to the memory of Emperor Franz Stephan, husband of Maria Theresa, following his death in 1765. Less respectfully, Napoleon Bonaparte used this as a study during his occupation of Vienna. (Napoleon on credibility: "If you say you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna.") The adjacent Napoleon Room was his bedroom but is more famous as the room where the King of Rome spent most of his short life. For political reasons, Napoleon married Marie Louise, eldest daughter of Franz I – the last Holy Roman emperor and first Austrian emperor. Napoleon Bonaparte crowned their son, Napoleon Franz (1811-32), king of Rome. Following Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the young Napoleon Franz returned to Vienna and spent the rest of his life in virtual isolation in Schloss Schönbrunn. The boy was given the title Duke of Reichstadt in order for him to take an appropriate place at Vienna’s protocol obsessed court. (Napoleon Franz’s very impressive rocking cot is in the in the Hofburg.)

Further rooms have exquisite decorations and show off the Rococo art that Maria Theresa favored. It is somewhat ironic that despite centuries of hostilities, this more French interpretation of the heavier Italian baroque won the most favor in Austria. The Millionenzimmer (Millions Room) is particularly impressive and named after the expensive rosewood paneling with Indian and Persian miniatures. The only surviving ceremonial bed of the Habsburg court is in the Reichenzimmer. The bed was originally used in the Hofburg and dates from 1736 to the last years in which the emperor still went to bed in public.

The almost 9€ admission fee to Schönbrunn is not cheap, but it is definitely false economy to save the additional 2.60€ that the admission to the Maria Theresa apartments require.

The Schönbrunn area functioned as hunting forest to the Habsburg family for centuries. It was a convenient half-day ride outside Vienna, and only a small hunting lodge served as accommodations. Things became more gentile in the mid-17th century, when the widow of Ferdinand II had a small pleasure palace erected here. The palace was soon destroyed by the Turks, but after they were finally defeated by Prince Eugene, the future Joseph I instructed that a palace to rival Versailles should be erected. His successors suspended the work, and it took a feminine touch to see completion of the palace as we know it today.

After her marriage in 1736, Princess Maria Theresa received the palace as a summer residence and promptly had it renovated and enlarged. Nikolaus Pacassi received the commission to complete and enlarge the palace. He followed a strict baroque architectural layout, but, upon Maria Theresa’s orders, the interior decorations are a more feminine and relaxed Rococo. He also changed the exterior color of the palace from its white, blue, and pink to the now familiar Schönbrunn yellow. Ever since, Schloss Schönbrunn had been a favored summer residence of the Habsburg family.

The Imperial Tour of the palace interior includes 22 rooms, mostly those used by Austria’s penultimate emperor, Franz Joseph, and his wife Elizabeth, better known as Sisi. Although these rooms are not plain or simple by any stretch of the imagination, they are a lot less opulent than other palaces of lesser nobles from the same period. This is particularly noticeable in the apartments of the emperor. Kaiser Franz Joseph was known for his almost Spartan lifestyle and used a small, simple iron bed for most of his life. He actually died in the one in his bedroom here on November 22, 1916.

Things are slightly more luxurious in the apartments of the empress, which also included the first and only separate toilet room in the palace – still one more than at Versailles! The dining room table is laid out as it would have been in the early 20th century. When dining with family, Franz Joseph would set aside at most 40 minutes. He was a famously hard worker, but, unfortunately, it took more than hard work to successfully rule an empire.

A highlight of the tour is the 40m long Großen Galerie (Great Gallery). This ballroom’s finest moments were in 1814-15, when it was the primary setting for the balls accompanying the Vienna Congress, which decided the fate of most of Europe following the defeat of Napoleon. More recently, it was the setting for the meeting in 1961 between John F Kennedy and Nikita Chruschtschow

Using the audio guide included in the admission fee, touring these rooms take around 40 minutes. The ever-present group tours are ultimately the main determinant at how fast or slow one can progress through the rooms.