I believe a regular dose of travel beauty (and dreaming) can be good medicine. And for me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art and architecture — which I’ve collected in a book called Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces. Here’s one of my favorites:
Around the year 1700, France was Europe’s number-one power, and the luxurious Palace of Versailles was Europe’s cultural heartbeat. For the king, money was no object and he packed it with beauty.
Visitors from around Europe flocked here hoping to get a glimpse of the almost-legendary king who built the palace — the great Louis XIV, known to all as the Sun King (ruled 1643–1715). They’d pass through a series of rooms, each more glorious than the last. There was the ornate Apollo Room, where the Sun King held court beneath a colorful ceiling painting depicting his divine alter-ego, the Greek god of the sun. They’d pass through the king’s official (though not actual) bedroom, where, each morning, the Sun King “rose” ceremonially from a canopied bed, attended by nobles who fought over who got to hold the candle while he slipped out of his royal jammies. Here in the home of the Sun King, bedtime, wake-up, and meals were all public rituals.
Finally, visitors would reach the heart of the palace: the Hall of Mirrors.
No one had ever seen anything like this magnificent ballroom. It’s nearly 250 feet long, dripping with glittering chandeliers, lined with gilded candelabras and classical statues, and topped with a painted ceiling showing Louis doing what he did best — triumphing. What everyone wrote home about were the 17 arched mirrors along the wall. Mirrors were a wildly expensive luxury at the time, and the number and size of these were astounding.
The sparkling Hall of Mirrors marks the center of this magnificent U-shaped palace. It’s where the king’s sumptuous apartments connected to the queen’s equally sumptuous wing.
From the Hall of Mirrors, you can fully appreciate the epic scale of Versailles. Visitors gaze out the windows onto the palace’s vast backyard. The gardens stretch, it seems, forever. It’s a wonderland of trimmed hedges and cone-shaped trees, hidden pleasure groves, and hundreds of spurting fountains. The extravagant gardens drove home the palace’s propaganda message: The Sun King was divine — he could even control nature, like a god. All in all, Versailles covers about 2,000 acres — twice the size of New York’s Central Park — laid out along an eight-mile axis, with the Hall of Mirrors at its heart.
The Hall of Mirrors was also the heart of European culture. Imagine a party here: The venue is lit by the flames of thousands of candles, reflected in the mirrors. Elegant partygoers are decked out in silks, wigs, rouge, lipstick, and fake moles (and that’s just the men), as they dance to the strains of a string quartet. Waiters glide by with silver trays of hors d’oeuvres, liqueurs, and newly introduced stimulants like chocolate and coffee. Louis was a gracious host who might sneak you into his private study to show off his jewels, medals, or…the Mona Lisa, which hung on his wall.
In succeeding generations, all Europe continued to revolve around Versailles. Everyone learned French, and adopted French taste in clothing, hairstyles, table manners, theater, music, art, and kissing. Even today, if you’ve ever wondered why your American passport has French writing on it, you’ll find the answer at Europe’s greatest palace — the Château de Versailles.
Daily Dose of Europe: A Little Bone Envy
I was just 19, visiting Romania for the first time. A new friend took me inside his home, to the hearth, and introduced me to what was left of his great-grandfather. It was a skull… dry, hollow, and easy to hold in one hand. He told me it was a tradition in the mountains of Transylvania for families to remember long-dead loved ones with this honored spot above the fireplace. I remember feeling a little bone envy.
Even though we’re not visiting Europe right now, I believe that travel dreaming can be good medicine. Last year, I published “For the Love of Europe” — a collection of my favorite stories from a lifetime of European travels — and this is just one of its 100 travel tales.
If you know where to look, you can find human bones on display in many corners of Europe. Later, on that same trip, I was in the Paris Catacombs. Deep under the city streets, I was all alone…surrounded by literally millions of bones — tibiae, fibulae, pelvises, and skulls, all stacked along miles of tunnels. I jumped at the opportunity to pick up what, once upon a time, was a human head. As what seemed like two centuries of dust tumbled off the skull, I looked at it…Hamlet-style. Just holding it was a thrill. I tried to get comfortable with it… to get to know it, in a way. I struggled with the temptation to stick it into my day bag. Imagine taking home a head dating back to Napoleonic times. What an incredible souvenir. But I just couldn’t do it. The next year, I returned to those same catacombs, pumped up and determined this time to steal me a skull. It was a different scene. Skulls within easy reach of visitors were now wired together, and signs warned that bags would be checked at the exit.
The Paris Catacombs show off the anonymous bones of six million permanent residents. In 1786, the French government decided to relieve congestion and improve sanitary conditions by emptying the city cemeteries, which had traditionally surrounded churches. They established an official ossuary in an abandoned limestone quarry. With miles of underground tunnels, it was the perfect location. For decades, the priests of Paris led ceremonial processions of black-veiled, bone-laden carts into the quarries, where the bones were stacked into piles five feet high and up to 80 feet deep, behind neat walls of skull-studded tibiae. Each transfer was completed with the placement of a plaque indicating the church and district from which that stack of bones came and the date they arrived.
Today, you can descend a long spiral staircase into this bony underworld (ignoring the sign that announces: “Halt, this is the empire of the dead”) and follow a one-mile subterranean public walk. Along the way, plaques encourage you to reflect upon your destiny: “Happy is he who is forever faced with the hour of his death and prepares himself for the end every day.” Emerging far from where you entered with white limestone-covered toes is a dead giveaway you’ve been underground, gawking at bones.
While I eventually outgrew my desire to steal a skull, in later years, as a tour guide, I’ve discovered I’m not the only one intrigued by human bones. If bones are on your bucket list, you’ve got plenty of options. Throughout Europe, Capuchin monks offer a different bone-venture. The Capuchins made a habit of hanging their dead brothers up to dry and then opening their skeleton-filled crypts to the public. Their mission: to remind us that in a relatively short period of time, we’ll be dead, too — so give some thought to mortality and how we might be spending eternity.
In the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, the bones of 4,000 monks who died between 1528 and 1870 are lined up for the delight — or disgust — of always wide-eyed visitors. A plaque shares their monastic message: “We were what you are…you will become what we are now.”
The Capuchins of Palermo, Sicily, offer an experience skull and shoulders above the rest. Their crypt is a subterranean gallery filled with 8,000 “bodies without souls,” howling silently at their mortality. For centuries, people would thoughtfully choose their niche before they died, and even linger there, getting to know their macabre neighborhood. After death, dressed in their Sunday best, their body (sans soul) would be hung up to dry.
In Kutná Hora, in the Czech Republic, monks take bone decor to an unrivaled extreme. Their ossuary is decorated with the bones of 40,000 people, many of them plague victims. The monks who stacked these bones 400 years ago wanted viewers to remember that the earthly church is a community of both the living and the dead. Later bone-stackers were more into design than theology — creating, for instance, a chandelier made with every bone in the human body.
In Europe, seekers of the macabre can get their fill of human skeletons. And in doing so, they learn that many of these bones — even long after death — still have something to say.
This story appears in my newest book, “For the Love of Europe” — a collection of 100 of my favorite memories from a lifetime of European travel. Please support local businesses in your community by picking up a copy from your favorite bookstore, or you can find it at my online Travel Store.
Stay tuned, travel buddies. Upcoming posts will be sure to carbonate your daily routine — such as a European-festivals bonanza — with running bulls, Euro-Mardi Gras, a crazy horse race, and huge tents filled with dirndls, lederhosen, and giant beers — at our next Monday Night Travel event. So, be sure to stick around, and invite your friends to join us here as well!
Daily Dose of Europe: Monet’s “Water Lilies”
Monet’s “Water Lilies” float serenely in two pond-shaped rooms in a Paris museum. Painted on eight mammoth curved panels, they immerse you in Monet’s world. It’s like taking a stroll in the gardens at Monet’s home at Giverny, enjoying his tranquil pond dotted with colorful water lilies.
Even though we’re not visiting Europe right now, I believe a daily dose of travel dreaming can be good medicine. And for me, one of the great joys of travel is having in-person encounters with great art — which I’ve collected in a book called “Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces.” Here’s one of my favorites.
Monet shows the pond at different times of day. Panning slowly around the museum’s hall, you can watch the scene turn from predawn darkness to clear morning light to lavender late afternoon to the glorious golden sunset.
Get close to see how Monet worked. Each lily is a tangled Impressionist smudge composed of several different-colored brushstrokes: green, red, white, lavender, blue. Only when you back up do the colors resolve into a single “pink” flower on a “green” lily pad. Monet wanted the vibrant colors to keep firing your synapses.
Now step farther back to take in the whole picture. Only then do you see that the true subject is not really the famous water lilies but the changing reflections on the pond’s surface. The lilies float among sun-kissed clouds and blue sky reflected in the water. It’s the intermingling of the classical elements — earth (the lilies), air (the sky), fire (sunlight), and water — the primordial soup of life.
The canvases at the Orangerie Museum are snapshots of Monet’s garden. In 1883, middle-aged Monet, along with his wife and eight kids, settled into a farmhouse in Giverny, near Paris. He turned Giverny into a garden paradise. Monet landscaped like he painted — filling the “blank canvas” with “brushstrokes” of shrubs and colorful flowers. He planted a garden with rose trellises, built a Japanese bridge, and made an artificial pond stocked with water lilies (nymphéas in French). Then Monet picked up his brush and painted it all — the bridge, trellises, pond — creating hundreds of canvases that brighten museums around the world. His favorite subject of all was the water lilies.
In 1914, Monet, now in his seventies, began a water-lily project on a massive scale. It would involve huge canvases — up to 6 feet tall and 55 feet long — to hang in purpose-built rooms at the Orangerie. Monet worked at Giverny, in a special studio with skylights and wheeled easels to accommodate the big canvases. He worked on several canvases at once, moving (with the sun) from one to the next to capture the pond at different times of day. For 12 years, Monet labored obsessively, even while he — the greatest “visionary,” literally, of his generation — was slowly going blind.
Like Beethoven did when going deaf, Monet wrote his final symphonies on a monumental scale. Altogether, Monet painted 1,950 square feet of canvas. In the final paintings, he cropped the scene ever closer, until there’s no reference point for the viewer — no shoreline, no horizon, no sense of what’s up or down…leaving you immersed in the experience. The last canvas shows darkness descending on the pond — painted by an 80-year-old man in the twilight of his life.
Monet never lived to see the canvases in their intended space. But in 1927, the “Water Lilies” were hung as Monet had instructed, in this specially built space to enhance the immersive experience. He’d created what many have called the first modern “art installation.”
This art moment — a sampling of how we share our love of art in our tours — is an excerpt from the new, full-color coffee-table book “Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces” by Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw. Please support local businesses in your community by picking up a copy from your favorite bookstore, or you can find it at my online Travel Store. To enhance your art experience, be sure to check out Rick Steves Classroom Europe, my free collection of 400+ teachable video clips — including a visit to Monet’s garden at Giverny.
Daily Dose of Europe: Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece
This altarpiece was painted for a medieval hospital, which specialized in patients suffering from horrible skin diseases. Before the age of painkillers, suffering patients could gaze on this great work of art and feel that Jesus understood their distress.
As America continues to suffer crisis upon crisis, it has never been more important to broaden our perspectives and learn about the people and places that shape our world. And for me, one of the great joys of travel is seeing art masterpieces in person. Learning the stories behind great art can shed new light on our lives today. Here’s one of my favorites.
The outer panel of the altarpiece was an image of Jesus, in agony, being crucified, flanked by a pale Mary and a grieving John the Evangelist. The artist, Matthias Grünewald, created a dark, gruesome, troubling Crucifixion that could not be more bleak. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The patients lying in this hospital needed some hope that their suffering had a purpose. A tiny seam running down the middle of the painting reminded everyone that there was a better world lying beyond. And on feast days, the priest opened the Crucifixion up at the seam, to reveal the panels on the inside of the polyptych.
Wow! We’re not in medieval Kansas anymore. The darkness parts, and Grünewald shows a more expansive, more colorful, and cheerier world. These inner panels put Christ’s seemingly tragic death in the wider context of his blessed birth and radiant resurrection.
In the Annunciation panel (left), a brilliantly dressed angel flutters in to tell a humble Mary she will give birth to a Savior. In the central scene, Mary beams as she looks down on her baby boy, while a celestial band of angels serenades them. Jesus has come down into the world — the real world — as seen by the castle in the background. His joyous mission is to defeat death, just as God the Father is doing in the shower of light.
Though Jesus came to be crucified, he overcame death. And that’s what we see in the Resurrection panel on the right. Jesus rockets out of the tomb, as this once-mortal man is now transformed into God.
Grünewald’s depiction of this popular Bible scene is unique in art history. Grünewald was a mysterious loner who had no master, no students, and left behind few paintings. But with his genius, he reinvented the Resurrection. Christ — the self-proclaimed “Light of the World” — is radiant. His once-plain burial shroud is now the colors of the rainbow (painted, legend says, by Grünewald’s assistant, Roy G. Biv). Jesus has undergone the “resurrection of the flesh,” and now look at his skin: His perfect white epidermis would have offered hope to all the patients who meditated on the scene. They had hope that the suffering they now endured was all part of God’s grand plan, and a loving God would reward them in the hereafter. Grünewald’s happy finale is a psychedelic explosion of Resurrection joy.
This art moment — a sampling of how we share our love of art in our tours — is an excerpt from the new, full-color coffee-table book Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces by Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw. Please support local businesses in your community by picking up a copy from your favorite bookstore, or you can find it at my online Travel Store.
Daily Dose of Europe: Paris’ Sainte-Chapelle
Notre-Dame has been on everyone’s mind over the last year. But just a short walk away is another stunning Parisian church, with the best stained glass anywhere.
As America continues to suffer crisis upon crisis, it has never been more important to broaden our perspectives and learn about the people and places that shape our world. And for me, one of the great joys of travel is seeing art masterpieces in person. Learning the stories behind great art can shed new light on our lives today. Here’s one of my favorites.
This tiny jewel of Gothic architecture is a cathedral of glass like none other. It was purpose-built by King Louis IX — the only French king who is also a saint — to house Jesus’ supposed Crown of Thorns.
Louis came upon the crown in Constantinople while on Crusade. Convinced he’d found the real McCoy, he spent a fortune to build a suitable chapel to hold it — and paid triple that for the precious crown. Today, the supposed Crown of Thorns is not on display, but the church is, along with its star attraction: stained glass.
You enter Sainte-Chapelle on the somber ground floor, wind your way up a tight spiral staircase, and then pop out — wow! — into a cathedral that seems to be made of nothing more than glowing colors and radiant light.
Fiat lux. “Let there be light.” From the first page of the Bible, it’s clear: Light is divine. In Sainte-Chapelle, the sunlight shines through the stained glass like God’s grace shining down to earth. The dazzling glory of Gothic glows brighter here than in any other church.
Gothic architects used new technology to turn dark stone buildings into lanterns of light. Sainte-Chapelle has only the slenderest of structural columns becoming ribs that come together to make pointed arches to hold up the roof, leaving “walls” of glass. Sainte-Chapelle was completed in a mere six years (Notre-Dame, just a few steps away, took 200), creating a harmonious structure that’s the essence of Gothic.
Worshippers are surrounded by 15 big windowpanes, with more than 1,000 different scenes. These cover the entire Christian history of the world, from the Creation to Christ to the end of the world — 6,500 square feet of glass in all. Each individual scene is interesting, and the whole effect is overwhelming.
Craftsmen made the stained glass — which is, essentially, melted sand — using a recipe I call “Stained Glass Supreme”: Melt one part sand with two parts wood ash. Mix in rusty metals to get different colors — iron makes red, cobalt makes blue, copper makes green, and so on. Blow glass into a cylinder shape, cut lengthwise, and lay flat to cool. Cut into pieces. Fit pieces together by drizzling molten strips of lead to hold them in place. The artist might use, say, blue glass for background, green for clothes, brown for hair. More intricate details — like folds in the robes or the line of a mouth — are created by scratching or painting the glass. Put it all together, and — voilà! — you’ve created a picture. Imagine the painstaking process of making the glass, fitting the pieces together to make a scene…and then multiply it by a thousand.
In Sainte-Chapelle, medieval worshippers could stand immersed in radiant light. They’d gaze upon the crown, ponder Christ’s sacrifice, see the sunlight pouring in like God’s grace as it illuminates Bible lessons in glass…and get a glimpse of the divine.
This art moment — a sampling of how we share our love of art in our tours — is an excerpt from the new, full-color coffee-table book, “Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces,” by Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw. Please support local businesses in your community by picking up a copy from your favorite bookstore, or you can find it at my online Travel Store. To enhance your art experience, you can find a clip related to this artwork at Rick Steves Classroom Europe; just search for Sainte-Chappelle.