Maria-Theresien-Platz

This guide to Maria-Theresien-Platz in Vienna returns to the thirteenth of May 1888, when every church bell in the city rang at once and Emperor Franz Joseph pulled the cord unveiling a bronze empress enthroned nineteen meters above the crowd, on what would have been Maria Theresa's birthday. It traces her four decades holding a fractured Habsburg empire together, and the mounted generals and advisers sculpted into the plinth beneath her by Caspar von Zumbusch, whose bronze casting alone took some thirteen years.