edited by Dave Collins

Many of us have known the princess Sissi through the television, in different films she was described us as a young girl, beautiful and spontaneous, but to say the truth the princess represented to the great public was very different from that real. In the films it's always made to see the history of a woman that had lived in free way and not conventionall despite pits the empress of Austria, instead the true princess rarely occupied the pages of the newspapers of that time and didn't find a lot of liking among people.

It was obsessed from the beauty, it made some very rigorous diets to avoid to fatten up to the point not to eat, it often made her squeeze the meat of buck and then she drank only the blood of it. It destined different time of own day to practise some sports, definite even to turn a place next to own personal bedroom to gym, where she daily performed and with regularity physical exercises that helped hert to be tonic. Three hours she passed a day to make herself comb the hair, long almost up to earth. All these obsessions of the princess were one reaction of her to the lost liberty in the moment in which she became the sovereign one of Austria.

Elizabeth is born to Monk of Baviera in December 24 th 1837, in the summer of 1853 she accompanies her mother and her sister most greater Helen to Bad Ischl to celebrate the birthday (23 years old) of her cousin, the emperor Francis Joseph. This last immediately falls in love him of Elizabeth, that was only fifteen years old. After few weeks from that meeting the engagement is announced among the two young people. The dream of Elizabeth to become empress of Austria transforms soon in a nightmare, because Sissi immediately realizes to have lost all the liberties of which she enjoyed before the wedding. The life of court doesn't like her, to the death of the only child Rodolfo, the state of mind of the empress falls in an abyss, she is closed more always in herself, she dresses only of black and she doesn't almost never make see in public.

To remain the more away from the life of court that by now it oppressed her, she undertakes different trips, during one of these, September 10 th 1898 is murdered in Geneva by the anarchist Italian Luigi Lucchesi. The body of the empress is brought to Vienna and interred in the Crypt of the Cappuccinis.