Mirabell Gardens

This guide to Mirabell Gardens in Salzburg tells the story of twenty-eight marble dwarfs that Archbishop Franz Anton Harrach had carved from Untersberg stone to entertain his court, modeled on caricatures the French engraver Jacques Callot had drawn decades earlier. It follows how a Bavarian crown prince had the figures hauled out and auctioned off in eighteen eleven, worried they would upset his pregnant wife, and the century they spent scattered across estates as far away as Bavaria before Salzburg voted to search for them in nineteen nineteen. Count the marble faces in the small bastion garden and see how many gaps remain.