The romantically inclined Empress Empress Elisabeth of Austria had a radiant white villa built on the island of Corfu between 1890 and 1892. Until her death in 1898, she repeatedly returned to her beloved Achilleion, which remains one of the island’s principal attractions today. The painter Hubert Sattler, who also incorporated the fatal assassination of Sisi in Geneva into one of his cosmoramas, painted the Achilleion as well, although he is unlikely to have seen it extensively with his own eyes. By that time, he was already over eighty years old. With a little imagination, the two female figures depicted in the park may be interpreted as the Empress and one of her ladies-in-waiting.

Corfu is one of eleven stops on an imaginary Mediterranean cruise that visitors have been able to embark on at the Panorama Museum since 3 June 2016. The exhibition traces travel impressions that Sattler transformed into large-format panoramas at various stages of his career as a showman and panorama artist, beginning with views of Taormina and Valletta from 1846.

During this voyage to North Africa, Sattler experienced a severe storm aboard the steamship Mentor, an event he later captured in paint. Subsequent cosmoramas were created depicting Mount Carmel and its monastery (1848), Istanbul (1851), the Bosporus (1854), Venice and Genoa (1860), Málaga (1868), Gibraltar (1869), Monaco (1883), and finally the Achilleion on Corfu.