Starting out as a few huts in a forbidding swamp, Brussels took more
than a thousand years to become the capital of the Duchy of Brabant, of
Burgundy, and from 1830 the capital city of the new kingdom of Belgium.
Today its name popularly evokes Eurocrat megalomania and miniature
cabbages, its image that of a beer-drinker's dream, a paradise of
chocolates and French fries. Yet Brussels, for all its reputation for
bureaucracy and extravagance, is a city that has always been open to
outsiders, to invaders and immigrants, always preserving its humanity.
Architecturally rich and culturally sophisticated, this European capital
defies its stereotypes. André de Vries explores a city and country in
perpetual search of an identity, still showing the scars of the
Counter-Reformation, peopled by the "Spaniards of the North." He
discovers a capital on the fault-line between Latin and Germanic
cultures, with its improbable hybrid languages. A place ruled by the
spirit of zwanze "self-mockery and derision," a city so down-to-earth
they had to invent surrealism. * THE CITY OF ARCHITECTURE: the home of
Horta and Art Nouveau; the Grand-Place and the Atomium; the palaces of
the European Commission; corrupt town planners and the joy of
destruction. * THE CITY OF EXILES AND VISITORS: Erasmus, Marx,
Proudhon, Victor Hugo, and Balzac; adventurers and soldiers; Byron,
Wellington, Victor Serge, and Alexandra David-Neel. * THE CITY OF
LITERATURE, ART, AND MUSIC: Charlotte Bronti, W.H. Auden, dos Passos and
Huysmans; cartoon heroes Tintin and the Smurfs; the artists Van der
Weyden, Brueghel, Ensor, and Magritte; excess and energy; Jacques Brel,
Johnny Hallyday, and Toots Thielemans.
