In the summers from 1961 to 1966, and again every summer since 1994, the steps leading up to St. Mary’s Cathedral in Erfurt have been the venue for open-air theater, music and opera performances at the DomStufen Festspiele, the Cathedral Steps Festival. This is a festival I have never attended, Read More …
When the French author Victor Hugo arrived in Cologne in 1840, the first thing he went looking for was the cathedral. He was, after all, the author of a gigantic best-selling novel about the cathedral in Paris, which in the eight years since its publication had made him famous and Read More …
Before visiting his cathedral, all I knew about St. Vitus was that there is a disease named after him, St. Vitus dance, otherwise known as Sydenham chorea, in which the patient makes jerky movements that look vaguely like some sort of dance. It turns out that St. Vitus dance is Read More …
Around 792 A.D. Charlemagne ordered the building of the Palatine Chapel on this site, and the rest of the cathedral was gradually built up around it. On Christmas Day of the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned “Emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III. This did not happen in Aachen, Read More …
Bordeaux’s city tourist office is quick to admit that the Cathédrale Saint André cannot compete with the ones in northern France like Amiens, Chartres or Reims, but they say its “heterogeneous appearance has something unexpected and endearing, in particular its separate bell tower.” This cathedral is where Anne of Austria (who Read More …
The first French king to be crowned in the Reims Cathedral was Louis VIII in 1223. The twenty-fifth and last was Charles X in 1825. Charles’s predecessor Louis XVIII and his successor Louis Philippe both decided not to have elaborate coronation ceremonies so as not to stir up even more Read More …
The church of Saint-Séverin is in the Latin Quarter in Paris, just 400 meters from the Notre-Dame cathedral and 600 meters from Sainte-Chapelle. I must have walked past the Saint-Séverin Church hundreds of times over the years, without ever going inside, but my curiosity was finally aroused when I read Read More …
The word parvis, in Italian, French, English and related languages, means a forecourt in front of a large public building, typically a cathedral or basilica. In French, the -s at the end of parvis is (usually) silent. The world’s first and most famous parvis is the one in front of Read More …
On a clear summer evening you could do worse than to join the many Parisians and visitors for a stroll along the banks of the Seine at sunset. I took this first photo in 2007 from the bridge called Pont de la Tournelle, looking towards Notre-Dame Cathedral. By coincidence this Read More …
Despite the similarity of their names (Verdi means greens and Monteverdi means green mountain), the opera composers Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) were not related to each other. Since Monteverdi was born 256 years earlier, he could have been Verdi’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, but he wasn’t. Geographically, however, they were Read More …