Pillar #7: Rome : Wine, pasta, gelato, cappucino :: Bruges : Beer, fries, chocolate, ???

Belgium is great.

Don't get me wrong. I love Rome and Italy in general. But there's something about Bruges that reminds me of home. (I've never been to the motherland aside from my brief weather-related diversion at the beginning of the trip, so stay tuned until May for more on that.) It could be that the food is really, really good, and typically much heartier than Italian food. It's an interesting combination of French and Flemish/German food resulting from their history of being basically a kind of independent Flemish mercantile city-state and later being controlled by the court of Burgundy (Frenchies), so you get a lot more meat-and-potatoes dishes. They call the flat area consisting of northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands the "Low Country," and with it's proximity to the North Sea and connection by canals, there is a lot of seafood in their diet also. Of course, there are Belgian waffles and chocolate abundant on nearly every street, and "frites" or fries available at most restaurants and in the main market square (with many toppings to chose from, including ketchup, mustard, beef stew, and my favorite, mayonnaise).

And there's the famous Belgian beer, which is so pervasive because they drank it as a safer, cleaner alternative to water during the Middle Ages. Yesterday, we took a really fascinating tour of the only remaining brewery in Bruges, the Half Moon Brewery, which makes the Bruges Zot beer (Bruges Joker), and we learned all about the history of brewing in Belgium. There were evidently over 1,000 breweries at one point, and now there are only 125, mostly located outside of cities to have more room. (Don't worry. They still make about 8,000 different beers.) In fact, our tour guide said that even their brewery wasn't large enough to bottle the beer or do some of the other steps, so they relied on outside breweries for help. After 6 weeks in wine country, it has been a great change of pace.

My only complaint so far is the coffee, which is neither that good nor cheap. In Rome, a 1 euro cappucino is standard, and they really have the blend of coffee to milk down. In Belgium though they get a little too 'froo-froo' with their coffee, like putting whipped cream on top, giving you a little cookie or chocolate, serving it on a small wooden tray, and bumping the price up to 2.50 euro, and it's really not all that great. I suppose that is the French influence in an otherwise practical town. (I'm told that many Bruggers don't really care for the French anyway.)

I suspect that practicality is why I have enjoyed Bruges so much. The reason we have come here is because Bruges, unlike most Italian cities, is not built on ancient foundations, nor evolved from heavily religious roots, but it was started as a mercantile port city that eventually grew to be the largest city in Europe for several centuries during the Middle Ages. It serves as a really fascinating link between the Italian Medieval cities we've been studying and American cities. Although it doesn't have main armatures that are as immediately apparent (see earlier posts), it does have many of the same patterns as most of the cities we've seen in Italy--a major market square, a major civic/religious square, multiple churches, winding streets with public spaces interspersed, and a wide mix of uses. One of my favorite differences is the scale of the city (roughly 30,000-40,000 people at its peak), which translates into a much lower city (3-4 stories in the densest parts, 5 stories in the large market square and of course taller for important civic buildings) with wider streets. I haven't confirmed this, but I'm thinking this is due to the fact that these northern European cities don't get as much natural light as southern cities (which has been painfully evident during this rainy, cold trip), so they couldn't put the buildings as close together. So basically you get a city with an overall scale and founding conditions (America being a largely practical mercantile society as well) that is much closer to early American cities. And so, the first trusses in the bridge back to U.S. urbanism are in place.