She arrived in Vienna in 1622 and immediately learned German, dismissed most of her Italian servants rather than importing her own court, and set about making the Habsburgs a centre of musical culture. During her tenure, the Imperial court in Vienna became one of the centres of European Baroque music. She introduced opera and ballet to the Habsburg court, beginning a tradition of attending performances during imperial family celebrations in 1625 for which a large wooden hall was built at the Hofburg. The tradition she established shaped Viennese musical culture for the century that followed. She had grown up in Mantua, one of the great Renaissance courts of Italy, been educated in a Gonzaga monastery in languages, history, music, and painting from the age of ten, and was betrothed twice before Ferdinand II's envoy arrived in 1621. The marriage worked, despite Ferdinand being twenty years her senior. They had no children, but she became genuinely close to all his stepchildren, particularly with the youngest one, the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, in whom she formed a taste for art and literature. When the War of the Mantuan Succession broke out in 1628 and imperial forces sacked her homeland, she was Empress of the court that had ordered it. The sources do not record what she felt about that. When Ferdinand died in 1637 she withdrew to convent life but remained at court, arranged the marriage of her great-niece to her stepson Ferdinand III, and ran an extensive correspondence with Italian and Austrian relatives until the end. Her heart was removed after her death and placed beside her husband's tomb. Her body was buried in the Discalced Carmelite monastery she had founded herself. Died on this day in 1655, Eleonora Gonzaga, Holy Roman Empress. She brought Italy to Vienna, and Vienna has been musical ever since. Follow History Roadshow for a new untold story every day.