Legend has it that the founder of Bern, Duke Berthold V of Zähringen (1160-1218), decided to name the city Bern because a bear was the first animal he saw when he went out hunting in the vicinity. In any case, there is a bear in the city’s coat of arms, Read More …
In the 1st arrondissement of Paris, equidistant from the Louvre, the Palais Royal and the Bourse de Commerce, there is an elegant nineteenth-century passage called Galerie Véro-Dodat, with wood-panelled shop fronts, black marble columns and paintings on the ceiling. The Galerie was named after its developers, who by coincidence were Read More …
After twelve densely packed rooms of the thematic tour of ancient Egypt, a long staircase (or an elevator for people with restricted mobility) leads down to room 13, where a huge royal tomb is on display. It is the red granite tomb of pharaoh Ramses III, who ruled Egypt from Read More …
Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) was the French scholar who founded the study of Egyptology by being the first to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He published his translation and analysis of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822 and 1824. Shortly thereafter he took on the task of establishing a new department of Read More …
The Cluny Museum, also known as the National Museum of the Middle Ages, was founded in 1843. It is located in the Latin Quarter in a much older building, the former Cluny Abbey, built in the late fifteenth century on the site of the Gallo-Roman baths from the first to Read More …
The most famous and most intriguing exhibit in the Cluny Museum is “La Dame à la licorne” (The Lady and the Unicorn). This exhibit consists of six large tapestries on display in a special rounded room with subdued light. Five of these tapestries show the five senses; Taste, Sight, Touch, Read More …
In the summer of 1595 — or maybe it was 1596, nobody knows for sure — a young English playwright woke up from a weird and wonderful dream and started writing it all down as fast as he could, before the dream faded. In this dream the Duke of Athens, Read More …
The Lahn River flows through Gießen, but not through the city center, so you won’t see the river unless you go looking for it. The Lahn is a popular river for canoeing, and for cycling along the banks. At Lahnstein, about 140 km downstream from Gießen, the Lahn empties into Read More …
The university in Gießen was founded in 1607 as the Ludoviciana, after the then-ruling Landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt, Ludwig V. His reason for founding a new university was that the nearby University of Marburg, in the neighboring landgraviate of Hessen-Marburg, had converted to Calvinism, so Ludwig as a fervent Lutheran was Read More …
Right around the corner from the Mathematikum is a small but fine museum devoted to the life and work of Justus Liebig (1803-1873), the 19th century chemist for whom the university in Gießen is now named. The eleven rooms of the museum are Liebig’s laboratory from his years as a Read More …