The obelisk with the made-up symbols

At the end of this avenue stands an obelisk, balanced on the backs of four gilded turtles, above a grotto with water streaming out of it.

 

Egypt was all the rage in the eighteenth century, and an obelisk stood for permanence, which is exactly what a dynasty likes to believe about itself. Hieroglyphs run up the shaft, supposedly telling the story of the Habsburg family.

 

The trouble is, nobody could read them. The Rosetta Stone turned up only twenty years after this thing was built, and deciphering it took decades more, so the symbols here are pure invention, dreamed up by a court artist who had seen them on prints. They look impressive and mean absolutely nothing.

 

That fits this corner of the garden, where the court entertained itself with the ancient and the far away, and where anything went as long as it looked old.

 

A hundred and fifty metres further on you'll find the finest example of that.