Austrian spa town Bad Ischl: Emperor Franz Joseph hidden away

History's great figures are so caricatured you could forget they were real people with the same emotions we all enjoy and endure. Emperor Franz Josef, with his ridiculous whiskers and tinkling medals, is a tragic buffoon from a comic opera. But in Bad Ischl he seems all too human, struggling to understand his changing times, strangled by rigid court etiquette, beset by family suicides and assassinations. Here, he isn't an emperor, but a man in love with a wife who never loved him back until the day she died horribly, stabbed in the stomach by an anarchist while promenading in distant Geneva.

Was it unbearable being Franz Josef? If so, he was at his happiest here in this alpine town 50 kilometres east of Salzburg

The tourism business is keen to seduce you with such stories of jolly summers in a town where imperial-era nostalgia is preserved like Miss Havisham's wedding dress. The gilded coffeehouses, concert theatres and Biedermeier hotels are all still there, but the central characters are long gone. Bad Ischl is a place to indulge in frivolity while keeping a lookout for the looming clouds of history's that created the perfect storm in 1914, leaving this operetta-like resort an empty stage.

Bad Ischl first grabbed aristocratic attention for its mineral springs and bracing alpine air, just the thing to counteract gout and hysteria. In the 1820s Princess Sophie came for an infertility treatment that swiftly produced Franz Josef and three other sons and sealed the town's reputation. The grand and very yellow Hotel zur Post opened in 1828 to cope with the deluge of well-heeled visitors. It still sits in the town centre, jaunty as a trumpet blast. Pot-bellied wrought-iron balconies recall the fat generals and plump countesses who once stayed here, took to the waters, and enjoyed a surfeit of schnitzels and gossip.

You can still wallow in spas in Bad Ischl, but most come for the town's prettiness and Hapsburg connections. Sophie's ill-fated son Maximilian, future emperor of Mexico, was born in a house on the Esplanade. His brother Franz Josef proposed to Elizabeth of Bavaria (Sissi) at the Hotel Austria in 1835. They'd only met the day before and were infamously mismatched.

The uxorious Franz Josef had his wedding-present villa in Bad Ischl extended to form the letter E, but the ever-restless Elizabeth rarely stayed. Still, the emperor came to the Kaiservilla every summer between 1849 and 1914, cramming it with chamois horns and knick-knacks. On a guided tour, you see the desk at which Franz Josef signed a declaration of war on Serbia following the assassination of his nephew Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The war the ageing emperor never wanted swept his family and empire away.

Now fake Hapsburgs re-enact imperial events during the town's August festival, though none that feature knife-wielding anarchists. A faux royal couple arrives by steam train, a red carpet unfurls through the town centre and townsfolk emerge in their best dirndls. Bands hoot and bang away among the flowerbeds of the public park in a nod to Bad Ischl's musical heritage. Brahms, Bruckner, Strauss the Younger and Lehar all summered here on the coat-tails of royal patrons. Bad Ischl is a Merry Widow sort of town, and the waltz surely its signature tune: light, frothy and oblivious to Sturm und Drang.