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"Francesca von Habsburg: The It-girl who became an empress">Francesca von Habsburg: The It-girl who became an empress" "She was a wild, pop star-dating good-time girl. Then she married the Archduke of Austria and life changed forever. But Francesca von Habsburg still knows how to throw a party, as Sholto Byrnes finds on a vodka-fuelled artistic voyage up the Danube. I am immersed in a hot pool outside the Gellert Hotel in Budapest talking to the Archduchess Francesca von Habsburg. We are both in our swimsuits, it is raining, and I am holding a flip-flop over my tape recorder to shield it from the drizzle. It is not quite the way that I had imagined interviewing the woman who would be the Empress-inwaiting of most of Eastern Europe were the Austro-Hungarian empire ever to be restored. But then Francesca von Habsburg is not your run-of-the mill imperial archduchess, starchy of manner (and collar) and shielded from the common horde by a bodyguard of fussy courtiers. Now, at 47, she is a leading figure in the art world, present at all the major biennales and international art fairs. And she has just launched Kuba, her most ambitious art project yet, in which a barge containing an installation by the Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman, is travelling up the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna, stopping at six cities along the way.The area is deeply significant to her, both through her own family and that of herhusband, the Archduke Karl, who is the heir to a bewildering number of (sadly no longer existent) thrones, including those of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Transylvania, Galicia and Illyria...."
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