The Euro sign stands in downtown Frankfurt under the European Central Bank. I took this photo right after the French and Dutch voted "No" on the European Constitution. I thought it was funny that it was a construction site.
Willy Brandt was the much-admired initiator of Ostpolitik (trying to get Communist East Europe to behave like normal neighbors), mayor of Berlin during the Berlin crisis, and later Chancellor of Germany. He resigned after it was discovered that his personal assistant was a spy for the East German secret service, Stasi.
Brandt's real name was Herbert Frahm, but Herbert-Frahm-Platz doesn't have the same ring.
The carving says: "German house, German land, Shield it God with a strong hand."
The Germans love flowers and most windows seem to have flowers in them. Wistaria season made this ugly building come to life.
The quotation is from the philosopher Immanuel Kant: "To the True, the Beautiful, the Good."
In spite of its name, the Frankfurt Alte Oper (Old Opera House) is used for concerts, not opera. That is because it was bombed in 1944 and stood in ruins for years. Meanwhile, a new opera house was built elsewhere. The old Opera House was restored in the early 1980s. There is a nice cafe next to the Alte Oper and "Fressgass" (Gobble Alley), a pedestrian street lined with restaurants, stretches away from the Opera Plaza.
This tower is about 100 meters high, leans more than two meters sideways, and was built in the early 1100s. At the time, building the towers became competitive among powerful families. There is a second tower nearby, not as high; these ancient twin towers are main landmarks of Bologna.
It's appropriate that there are motorcycles in this photo. The noise from them is ear-shattering all day long.
Photos of people who resisted the Fascists are permanently posted on the walls of the City Hall.
The carving apparently dates from Fascist times because it uses the Fascist title for Mayor, Podestà . It says: "The ancient insignia of the mayors of Bologna, which were once hung in the Great Hall of Justice, were put up here in 1914."
Frankfurt has quite a lot of strange sculpture. There are a couple of enormous Euro signs, a huge Hammering Man, a running man, a subway car crashed halfway through the pavement, and this enormous tie.
This is actually Goethe's reconstructed house. He was born on this spot, but the house was burned down in an an air raid in 1944. It was reconstructed to look much the same.
Most gondolas are black, a rule that began as a sumptuary law, I believe. I've never seen any other colored ones in Venice.
October 2003. A hundred years ago it was rare for water to come this high, but in modern Venice it happens several dozen times a year.
Boinice Castle was built in the middle 1800s and has a ghost festival every year. The town is a pretty, friendly tourist town where almost no one speaks English. We were there for a wedding.
Vienna was a Roman city called Vindobona long ago, and directly before the Hofburg, or royal palace, in the central city, is an excavated Roman wall that has been left exposed below what is now street level.
The Accademia Bridge in Venice is made of wood. There are only three bridges across the Grand Canal. At one time there was discussion of building a transparent bridge here, as of glass, but the Venetians preferred their old wooden bridge, even though it was originally supposed to be temporary.