An art collector who prefers to rely on her own instincts rather than those of a personal curator, Francesca von Habsburg, made news at Basel a couple of years ago when she paid 35,000 Euros for a 'sound installation' by a relatively unknown Icelandic artist called Finnbogi Petursson. The room-sized work was earmarked for her five-year-old Vienna-based art foundation dedicated to showing experimental 21st century art from across the world - T-B A21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary). A fixture at all the major biennales, she is a force to reckon with in the international art firmament. Recently, she was in the news again when she launched Kuba, her ambitious art project wherein a barge containing an installation by Turkish artist, Kutlug Ataman, is travelling up the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna, stopping at six cities along the way.

Yet art is not the only reason why she is a newsmaker. As the only daughter of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, an Eastern European industrialist-billionaire known as the greatest art collector of his age and his second wife, Fiona Campbell Walter, a leading British fashion model of the '50s and '60s, she is a celebrity in her own right. Once the 'It' girl of '80s London, where she studied for two years at the St Martin's College of Art, she has tried her hand at modelling, acting, singing...and dating pop stars. Then, on January 31, 1993, Francesca married the Archduke Karl of Austria. As wife of the heir to the non-existent thrones of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Transylvania, Galicia and Illyria, she would be the empress-in-waiting of most of Eastern Europe, were the Austro-Hungarian Empire ever to be restored.

Last month, she made a lightning visit to familiarise herself with contemporary Indian art - an event that would have gone unrecorded in the media, were it not for the fact that Verve constantly has a finger on the pulse of the art world. Besides back-to-back encounters in Delhi with avant-garde artists working in new and exciting media, her 10-day itinerary included a visit to Benares ("that was an incredible experience and even a slight privilege") and an audience with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala ("I have met him earlier, so he greeted me as an old friend"). Hats off to her, for though she was "down with the flu" and utterly exhausted by the time she made a one-day stopover in Mumbai, she kept her commitment to the string of meetings set up with the city's artists.