You may have noticed that the menu is broken. It’s a continual problem I have with the settings on this site, in fact I’d thought I’d fixed it but looks like it only made things worse.
I’m going to see what I can do about it, but in the meantime if you want to check out the posts from my earlier trips then scroll to the bottom of the page, pick a link you fancy, and repeat!
Amidst the ghostly swamps and forests of the north-eastern corners of Europe, as the night sweeps in across the wetlands, the princely knight grows tired from the day’s hunting and looks for somewhere to lay his head. It has been a worthwhile excursion from his ducal seat at Trakai, and out here by the banks of the lazy Vilna river he and his party have managed to bag a wolf. But it’s time for rest.
And sleep brings dreams, dreams to the brow of peasant and princely knight alike. And not even a Grand Duke of Lithuania can control what the night will show him in his slumber. As Gediminas sleeps, suddenly the wolf appears atop a great hill by the river. And apparently made of iron. And inside the iron wolf appear a hundred more, all howling, and such a howling had never been heard since the pagan gods had created the great pagan world…
What could it mean! In the morning Gediminas wisely consults with his krivis, his pagan priest. The priest replies; the iron wolf represents the castle you will build on this hill, and the great city that will grow around it. And the howling? That’s the sound of the city’s deeds and accomplishments bellowing across the world, echoing across history. That and “thanks for sticking that arrow up my how’s-yer-father, you’re a charmer aren’t you?”
I made that last bit up. And so Gediminas built the city of his dream, the city named after the river, the city that we know of as Vilnius in English. It was then opened up to German immigrants, religion not a problem, and over the centuries Vilnius developed a reputation as a multicultural centre of trade and learning, a place where one of the most significant Jewish communities in Europe sat alongside Muslim Tartars, Eastern Orthodox and Polish Catholics. Gediminas remains a hero here, though clearly they’re willing to forgive his rather indelicate funeral arrangements – as his body was cremated, they didn’t invite his best friend and some of his slaves to the wake. They were invited onto the funeral pyre instead.
To this day Vilnius’ symbol is the iron wolf, and over the last four or five hundred years or so the inhabitants must have felt like they were too being slowly barbecued over a roasted spit. Incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 1700s, breaking free in 1918 only to have to fight off the Poles, ending up with Stalin and the Soviet Union, despite a brief period of Nazi, er, freedom (a good number of Lithuanians willingly joined in with the Holocaust). Today Lithuania has been independent for just over 30 years, but as I write this in 2023 old ghosts are arising, ghosts of invasion and war, arising again over the eastern borders, echoing through the troubled sleep of today’s Vilnius…
By the way, it’s a lovely city. Fancy a look? See you soon.
The final stop on my train trip is Munich. Busy, business-like, full of office workers rushing past, tourist crowds wandering along the streets and through the cavernous station subways. Distinctive Munich, capital of a Bavarian duchy that became a kingdom under Napoleon and stayed that way until 1918. Even within the modern Federal Republic, Bavaria stands apart, linguistically and culturally closer to Austria than to the rest of Germany. Munich, the place where the chic shops start selling Lederhosen and Dirndl for Oktoberfest. Where the blue-and-white colours of Bavaria are everywhere, including the logo of the local carmaker Bayerisches Motor Werke. (Or BMW for short.)
Like most great European cities Munich has its share of lovely churches and monumental avenues, but much of the built environment has had an eventful recent past. Indirectly, this was because Munich was also the birthplace of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement. The famous bierkellers were a good place for meetings in the formative days, and in 1923 it was here that he launched his Beer Hall Putsch. His grab for power failed and he ended up in jail, but he was handed easy time and soon he was back on the scene, leading to a war that caused the destruction of 45% of Munich’s buildings.
As in Cologne, Munich’s great icon is its cathedral, the Frauenkirche. And once again those two great towers were great navigational aids for Allied bombers. So they both escaped the serious damage the rest of the church suffered. Personally I prefer the flamboyant Gothic stylings of Cologne’s Dom to the more austere redbrick on show here, although there’s something deeply moving and restrained about those two towers, as though they’re monuments to events that must not be forgotten.
This jolly ceiling belongs to the Holy Ghost church and it’s quite the riot of guilded rococo stylings and grand Biblical narrative. A stunning revelation when you step in from the busy Mariaplatz area – and nearly all of it a post-war reconstruction.
Soon it was time to indulge in that other Munich, beery Munich, bierkellers and steins, oompah bands, lederhosen-heavy fun. I was a month early for the city’s most famous festival, but it’s always Oktoberfest in the kellers, and the most famous is the Hofbräuhaus.
Starting out as the state brewery in the 16th century, it was remodelled exclusively as a tavern at the end of the 19th when the brewing moved to the suburbs. Much of the building was destroyed in the war but that’s of little concern when visitors come to get destroyed every night. I made my way in, looked for a spare space on one of the trestle tables, ordered a beer and got stuck in.
Bierkellers are a great way to talk to strangers because the tables are long enough for different groups to sit alongside each other in an extremely convivial setting. So I got chatting to an American couple, sometimes mentioning the rather worrying news story I was following on my phone, but otherwise the fun continued, the in-house oompah band struck up again, and I settled down to my Hofbrau beer. A quick look at that news feed.
…and the Queen was dead.
I can still recall the seat, the wooden panel opposite, at a stretch my subconscious might even recall every graffito scratched into the table by the generations of visitors to the Hofbräuhaus. The oompah band played on, but it’s a blur. I passed on the news, the nice Americans passed their condolences. Soon I left, not knowing what you should do when your monarch dies (like most Britons under 75). And I’m not even a royalist.
I headed out into the Munich night, my head spinning, a central and unifying backdrop to all our lives having been ripped down, wondering what this meant for my homeland when terrible crises were already heading our way this autumn. Meanwhile back home, the well-practiced Operation London Bridge swung into action, old public figures got new titles, and I would spend much of the following day watching it unfold on TV.
Say hello to Kunigunde, everyone. (Kunigunde says Hi.) There she is, right in front of us, on her favourite spot on the old bridge right in the heart of beautiful old Bamberg.
And that’s not the only reason why she’s smiling. Her husband Heinrich, son of a Bavarian duke no less, has given her a most romantic “morning gift”. Now what could it be? The finest jewels, the most elegant dresses?
A booking for two at one of Bamberg’s picturesque restaurants? No. Fish from Bamberg:s own “Little Venice”? Nein. A lifetime consignment of smoked beer from one of Bamberg’s sixty-five old breweries? Nope.
No, hubby isn’t interested in any of the wonderful things the good people of Bamberg can come up with. Oh no.
She’s getting the whole of Bamberg itself. Now, look at that smile again. Smug, isn’t it?
Still, the locals wouldn’t begrudge them anything, since Heinrich (who became Holy Roman Emperor) and Kunigunde were heavily responsible for Bamberg’s development having founded a bishopric here in 1007. In fact Kunigunde, a key political advisor to her husband, was loved so much they made her a saint. The power couple even had a cathedral built in 1002. After a few fires we’re left with a reconstruction that dates back to the early 13th century.
Ah, you’ve found him, the enigmatic Rider. Rather distractedly, as if he’s thinking about checking his phone for texts, he’s looking towards the tomb of Heinrich and Kunigunde. A pilgrim? King Stephen of Hungary? No-one knows, although scholarship is tending to the latter. What we do know is that he was originally painted and with dark hair. And what you probably already guessed was that Hitler and the Nazis tried to pretend the Rider had been painted with blond hair and blue eyes. But that was eighty years ago. Such a good thing that things have moved on and we no longer have to deal with the lies and misinformation of the far-right.
The cathedral lies on one of the supposed seven hills of Bamberg, on the town’s south west corner. Here the prince-bishops had their very-splendid residences and Bamberg continued being lovely as it developed from the medieval through the Counter-Reformation and onto the Baroque. It wasn’t all wonderful though. There were wars now and again, but the worst came with the witch-burning mania of the early 17th century. It’s estimated that around 800 people, mostly women, were murdered until the Swedes occupied the place during the Thirty Years War and the madness came to an end.
So there’s two spires of the Cathedral to the left, a monastery on the hill to the right, and you can also see the river Regnitz. Note the buildings on the riverside, a very narrow stretch of land called the Strand. The hills belonged to power – the church, the Franconian nobility, the prince-bishops – and the local people had to find somewhere else if they were going to have a decent-sized town hall. It’s not clear to me why they didn’t just plonk it on the bank from where we observe the scene, maybe it belonged to someone else. So the story goes that the frustrated burghers just dug some stakes in the middle of the Regnitz, created an artificial island, and went on to build one of Germany’s most famous sights, the Altes Rathaus.
With the fine Baroque additions, the gatehouse, the frescoes, it’s quite a thing to see from any angle. There’s another bridge through the other wing by the way, and that’s where you’ll find smiling Kunigunde.
Now you’re probably asking yourself something. Given what we said about Cologne, is what we’re seeing here original, or a post-war reconstruction? (The answer to your other question is easy. Rat is German for “council”. I don’t know where the pest controllers work).
It turns out Bamberg was cleverer. The city prospered through the Middle Ages and onwards to the 18th century, but it started to slide in influence and in 1802 it was ceded to Bavaria from Franconia. So they’d managed to jettison their economic and strategic importance well before the Second World War! In the end only about 4 percent of the town was destroyed and everything I’m showing you is original. Happy days. (Unless you were in the 4%…)
Bamberg then. A special jewel in the heart of old Franconia-sorry-Bavaria. I’ve been lucky with the weather while I’ve been here, and I hope it holds as I push on further on into Bavaria tomorrow. So much more I could have said, so much more I could have shown you, but I hope this is enough for you to feast upon, maybe encourage you to come out sometime to have a look for yourself. (If you do, I suggest you crack open your Duolingo and brush up your German; unless the inland cruise ships are in town it’s very much set up for domestic tourism).
One more tidbit to leave you with. I implied that Bamberg wasn’t bombed because the Allies saw no reason to concentrate on it. Apparently some of the locals have another explanation. The RAF and the Americans did give it a go but they came up against a impregnable defensive shield which no munition could get through.
The name of the person responsible for this defence system is probably still top secret, but I’ll give you a hint. She’s got a lovely smile…
It might have been because of the sunny weather (better than forecast) but Cologne really appealed to me. Set by the gracefully flowing Rhine, Cologne has two thousand years of history going for it, back from when the Romans established their Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippenensium here on the banks of the mighty river.
The city thrived during the Middle Ages and became renowned for its twelve Romanesque churches, as well as a few markets in the bustling old town. The churches and the markets are still there, but the bustling nowadays bustles between modern buildings. Cologne was one of the most bombed cities anywhere during the Second World War, and the city was completely destroyed. They chose not to restore the market places or the old town, just the churches.
One place that just about survived was the city’s symbol, the Dom.
Cologne Cathedral.
In 1248 they wanted somewhere to store a reliquary of the Three Kings. And in those days, for that sort of thing you tended to go large. That way the Amazon delivery people would know where to leave it.
They went so large that the money ran out in 1560. In 1814 they found something behind an equally big sofa and started up again. By 1880 they’d finally finished. The towers are 157 metres high, making it the third tallest church in the world. Truly impressive, visible for miles around, and built to the original plan.
Unfortunately, members of the Allied air forces in the 1940s had strong views about the German ecclesiastical architectural ascetic. In general, towers were good for navigation purposes, but the rest really had to go. So the Dom was bombed fourteen times, but repaired over subsequent decades. And of course Air Vice-Marshalls Erosion and Pollution are still scrambling their forces, and the work goes on.
As you see, I took lots of photos but stayed outside so as to avoid the queues and enjoy the city a little more. I did get inside the porch of the Church of the Assumption nearby…
…but the gate to the nave was locked. A pity because the church houses some works by one of Rembrandt’s pupils…
…Bernhard Fuckeradt.
And after that, it was time for even more of the local Kölsch beer, before packing my stuff, catching the train and heading to Bavaria.
Quite frankly, I’d had enough.
You will have noticed from my posts that I’d done a bit of travelling since COVID travel restrictions had begun to roll back in 2021. And it’s something I love and I hope I’ll always be grateful for having the opportunity to go off and enjoy these adventures.
As 2022 rolled into view I hoped that some decent degree of normality would have returned by summertime and there were a stack of places I wanted to see. But normality wasn’t quite, well, normal. It wasn’t just the insanity in Ukraine and the consequent hike in fuel prices, although they didn’t help. As demand picked up again, the airline industry had real problems getting in the staff they needed. Some airports cut their slots and airlines cancelled whole tranches of summer flights. And for those passengers who managed to get a flight, the staff shortages meant their problems were only beginning.
In the distant past, in other words three years ago, it was simple. You’d look for somewhere to go, you booked a trip at a reasonable price, and then you’d sit back and look forward to the whole magical sequence of arriving at your swanky departure terminal, ready to be whisked through check-in and security and through to your gate, giddy with anticipation. Now, after finding one of the few flights available and paying the extra cost, you sit back and wait for the worrying email from the airline recommending that you better check your wheelie bag in. Once the morning arrives, your excitement on discovering that your flight hasn’t been cancelled is tempered when you remember that email. Why would they want to put more pressure on the understaffed baggage handling? Could it be … good God! … and then you remember those social media photos of humongous security queues stretching back out of the terminal all the way back to the gates of Hell itself.
So you resolve to take the advice you never had to take seriously before, and get to the airport three hours before your flight. Shaken with stress you survive security and eventually you get to the gate, and they are indeed carrying out a purge of the wheelie bags. Fortunately your seat is not affected and you, lucky traveller, are granted the humbling privilege of being allowed to take your cabin luggage into the cabin. But unfortunately the flight is late. After all that, you eventually limp down the jetty and make it to your seat, time to relax at last, sit back, and smile, as the plane pushes back, roars down the runway…and helps destroy the planet with its carbon emissions.
Some of these things had happened to me this year and I got to the point of not wanting to see the inside of an airport terminal for a long, long time. I’d had enough.
But I still wanted to do one more foreign trip this year, and it was going to have to involve the Eurostar from London St Pancras. And yes, it did mean my options were limited to northwestern Europe (even if I was going to compromise by flying back home from my final stop). But travelling by train offers many benefits of flying, if you’re happy with the extra travel time. It’s more relaxed, more flexible, and you feel more connected to the environment you’re travelling across when you travel through a place instead of over it – the changing landscape as Europe develops before you, the great towns, the pretty villages, the countryside, farms and forests, hills rising above and around you. It’s easier to believe your destination has grown around you organically while you’ve been travelling, rather than something you’ve been plonked into from a great height.
So it was with some excitement that I reached St Pancras and then left the dingy, overcrowded departure hall for the gleaming Eurostar to Brussels, underneath the still glorious station canopy.. A couple of hours later I was skipping off the train and heading for my hotel in the equally dingy Belgian capital for my one-night stay.
A quick peek at the Grand Place, and then around the corner to the most overrated tourist attraction in all Europe, and back to the hotel. The following morning, I was on my way to Cologne for the first of two nights there before heading off into deepest Germany.
More from the banks of the Rhine in my next post.
My last few hours in Milan before heading to the airport, and home. Mid-afternoon, thirty degrees, hot, sticky, big city, crowds. Shattered. Time to sign off.
Yesterday I did manage to fit in a couple of extra sights before the heat became unbearable. First it was onto the metro and out to the west.
The San Siro Stadium wax originally named as such to reflect the district it’s in, but in 1980 noit was actually renamed after Guiseppe Meazza, one of the great figures of post-war Italian football. So although it’s commonly called the San Siro Stadium – even by the public transport people – it should probably be known by its new name, the Guiseppe Meazza Stadium. The San Siro Stadium was originally opened in 1926, but the iconic renovation incorporating the famous swirly towers was undertaken in the 1980s as a facelift ahead of Italy’s hosting of the 1990 World Cup.
It must be one of few great stadia that look truly awe-inspiring and monumental from the outside, but I of course wanted to go inside to take in the views familiar to football fans the world over for thirty years, and to sense something of the place that AC Milan and Inter Milan players and fans call their home.
And that was the tricky bit today.
Sure, they do a stadium tour you can book at the gate, and there were a number of tourists milling around the vast concourse and various food concessions were setting up, but the tourists were milling around confused because the gates were shut. And all the food outlets were just setting up, not actually serving anyone, although it was nearly midday…as if they were preparing for something else…
What was going on? The Italian domestic football season had been wrapped up a couple of weeks before. The national team were indeed playing that night, but down the road in Bologna. I kept wandering around, and eventually found the ticket office. Which had a sign up.
Never heard of him.
Having made the, ahem, sacrifice of going out all that way, I came back into town and tried my luck at La Scala. They do a museum tour that includes a visit to the auditorium itself, a place familiar to opera lovers the world over since its opening in 1778. You yourself can experience something of the place that great composers such as Verdi and Puccini have graced, that all the great artistes like Caruso, Callas, Pavarotti…
You can see where we’re going with this. The museum was open but the auditorium was not; there was some matinee performance of something going on and they closed that part of the tour. I’d even booked ahead for this one, but maybe once again I hadn’t done the research. So I was just left with the paintings and sculptures of the greats in the museum. Here’s Verdi.
From that point I stopped trying to get into anything that required tickets – museums, churches – and as it got hotter I resorted to looking for a bite to eat and something to drink.
My last day was much the same. With a late flight booked I had time to do some strolling through the Castello Sforzesco…
…and the courtyard of the Brera Museum…
…before I realised it was all too crowded and steamy for me.
So now I’m near the station waiting for the moment to head to the airport. Which gave me time for some new snaps to, ahem, admire Centrale Station’s Futuristic motifs and its Fascistic oppressiveness.
I don’t like ending my tour on such a downer, but it had to end somewhere and we have all already been treated to some fantastic places during this tour. These last photos show us that when our species tries to outdo the eternal grandeur and majesty of the natural world with our own bombast, not only do we fall far short, we become prisoners of our own lack of humility, and – as happened here – millions of our fellow citizens end up becoming real prisoners, or worse.
Hunkered by a massive archway at the station exit, dwarfed by the scale of this monument to war-mongering dictatorship, the authorities had set up a little tent to receive refugees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I prefer the natural mountains to the man-made ones. They represent peace, not war.
See you all on the road again soon.
Milan. High-class fashion, yes, top football, yes, but otherwise on first sight it’s just another big city, with lots of busy people, loads of tourists, rush rush rush.
With only a couple of nights here I’ve zoomed in on a couple of sights and I’ll use the rest of the time to see if anything else crops up and see what else I can pick up about this huge city. Oh, and chill out before the flight home.
Out of the central station we go, and it’s … well, grand…
Surprise, surprise, its grandiose monumental feel was the result of the Fascists getting hold of the design towards the end of construction. Frank Lloyd Wright liked it. It must be the interior he liked. Which is cool.
Getting over the shock, it’s off to the hotel, then out on the underground. And the first thing to head to?
It’s one of those great sights that still takes your breath away once you see it for real, however many times you’ve seen it on TV and the like. The other surprise is that, although work started on it in the 14th century, it continued on and off through subsequent centuries until the last portal, the very last detail, was completed. In 1965. A living cathedral in more ways than one.
Details from the main door. While fitting in well with this great Gothic pile, it was actually inaugurated in 1908.
Fancy a look inside? If you’re nervous following your Lucerne bridge trauma, don’t worry, you’re in for a lovely, innocent Gothic/Baroque treat. Here we go!
The apse. You might just be able to pick out the red light of the medallion in the ceiling. This is where the Holy Nail is kept, a nail from the Crucifixion. Once a year the archbishop removes the nail and parades it amongst the people. I think he gets up there by way of the Holy Jetpack. Anyway, what a lovely story!
Here’s an alterpiece depicting the presentation of Mary to the Temple. At the top of the stairs waits a rabbi with his faithful, while the proud parents Anne and Joachim stand to the left. And Mary? She’s the adorable little girl at the foot of the stairs. How sweet! How innocent! How not gruesome at all!
And that’s not the most famous piece of art in the Duomo either.
Here it is, St Bartholomew, in the middle of his martyrdom, having been flayed so – that – his – skin…is…err…hanging off – his – body before – his beheading … err…
…and next door to the Duomo is the world-famous Victor Emmanuel arcade. Retail therapy?
La Scala.
Unfortunately there were not many concerts going on that I could sing about during my stay. Worse, that final meal I mentioned last time I was going to have to skip. Bookings to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper were filled some time ago, and rightly so.
So it looks like I can be choosy about what I take a look at tomorrow, which isn’t a bad thing. More later!
I’m writing this post as I sit on a grey platform at Lugano station. I normally love travelling by train but today is a grey day, a drizzly day, and I’m waiting for the train that will take me away from warm, lovely Lugano to my final destination, and after that back home, and back to work.
But as the train clickety-clacks me back to the crushing normality of the everyday, I will be dreaming of this place, dreaming of towering wooded peaks framing the soft, blue lake, dreaming of the lazy piazzas and warm strolls under the pines, dreaming of the brown rooftops bathing in the soft afternoon sun.
And dreaming, dreaming, of Gandria…
A small village stretched along the lakeside along the other side of Mount Bre, Gandria makes for a hugely popular short trip from Lugano. You can get there by boat in about twenty minutes, or you can walk it. My boat was pretty full, but like the best village destinations it seemed to absorb the crowds away, and it felt like I had the steep, narrow pathways to myself.
Gandria is right on the border, and in the 19th century it did a roaring trade in smuggling ciggies and booze across it to avoid the high Swiss customs duties (there’s a customs museum on the other side of the lake. Apparently it’s even got a submarine they used).
But before then Gandria’s main business was fortunately much more respectable – olive oil. A hard winter in 1709 killed the trees, but they have been replanted along the path back to Lugano – which we’re following – along with notices describing all you need to know about olive oil cultivation. Rather shockingly they’ve named this path which is all about olives Il Sentiero dell’olivo. The Olive Path.
And it’s gorgeous.
Well, the clock isn’t as windy as the Olive Path, it’s much less interested in whiling the day away, and my train is a few minutes away. My final destination will have its interests, like any big city, maybe something to sing about, and I may get a look a having a final meal.
But whatever I find there, it won’t be Lugano.
And it won’t be Gandria.
A curious place, Lugano. The canton of Ticino is a sliver of Italian in a predominantly German- and French-speaking nation-state, and it slivers right up against and into Italy itself.
Across Lake Lugano you can see the Italian town of Campione d’Italia. Then you see the hills of Switzerland that completely surround it – Campione d’Italia being an Italian exclave. And looking beyond those hills and woods you see the hills and woods of proper Italy that surround them.
And then there’s the weather. I mentioned the Mediterranean feel in my last post. But Lugano is roughly at the same latitude as Lyon in France. The difference is the Alps; it blocks all that cold northern rubbish so Lugano can literally bask in the sun.
And that’s the thing to do here. Bask in the sun, walk along the lake, ride up the mountains and enjoy the view, have a coffee in the piazzas, live la dolce vita!
Lugano has a number of lovely Romanesque churches hidden amongst the piazzas, and the church of Santa Maria degli Angioli is known for its fresco of the Crucifixion. Note the stairway. The town itself appears to be built on three levels, and it’s a steep walk – or funicular – up to the main train station.
Here’s another little gem, the church of San Antonio Abate in the Piazza Dante Alighieri. It was built between 1633 and 1676. By that time Lugano had been part of the Swiss Confederation for over a hundred years, having got tired of being constantly disputed over by the dukes of Como and Milan.
And that’s all there is to say about Lugano’s history, in terms of things that really grab the attention. A prosperous community that became Swiss, and got on with it. There was that little bother when Napoleon conquered the Confederation in 1798 and some Lugano residents rose up against it in 1799, proclaiming themselves to be “Free and Swiss”…
…then there are the four great Palazzi Rivas, of which this one, the Palazzo Riva-Ghioldi, is apparently the oldest…
…there’s the outside of the church of San Rocco…
…and the inside
…and it’s a rather nice town to wander around on a warm sunny day.
But it’s time to show you more of that incredible natural backdrop. Situated on a lake surrounded by verdant mountains on all sides, there are two hills that particularly dominate proceedings here. The peak of Mount Bre, seen here to the right, is allegedly the sunniest place in Switzerland.
The other one is Mt. San Salvatore. It’s the sugar-loaf mountain in the picture at the end of my last blog. Both offer funicular rides, and to end this post I’m going to indulge you with some photos I took when I took a ride to the top of San Salvatore yesterday.
orwellianTwo 