Cities of Europe [antikvár]

Introduction Looking back over their history, it's hard to find a time when they weren't killing one another, grabbing each other's land, sinking ships, burning churches, stealing works of art. Even today, when they've made what for want of a better word they call peace, they can't help fighting over the price of olive oil, wheat and codfish or whether to put clean gasoline in their cars. No, Europeans are not exactly one big happy family. But they do have fun. The land they grabbed is marvellously fertile, the churches they left standing are magnificent and the works of art eminently worth stealing. And when you taste your first Ge-novese tagliatelle al pesto or crusty French baguette, you'll understand that the olive oil and wheat are worth fighting for. Touring some of the three dozen cities we propose in this book, you'll soon sense that the good things of European life derive from its sheer diversity. Take the city parks. When you walk around the geometrically arranged lawns bordered by regiments of chestnut trees in Paris's Tuileries Gar- dens, you couldn't possibly mistake them for the rolling expanses of grass scattered with sturdy oaks, deck chairs and loving couples in London's Hyde Park. Paris's poets and philosophers meditate along right-angled or diagonal gravel paths while their London counterparts proclaim their wisdoms corralled in one corner of their park on dilapidated soapboxes. Even the so-called Englischer Garten of Munich has as its centrepiece a decidedly un-English beer garden. Or the cheeses. France may have 400 different kinds (the figure seems to change as often as the Dow Jones average), but the serious gourmet should not neglect the scores of others to be found in Italy, Britain or the Netherlands, each of them subtly different in aroma, texture and taste. The Baroque palaces of Austria do not resemble those of Italy; the beaches of Greece and Spain are as different as chalk and cheese. The diversity of urban landscape, cuisine or architecture is of course an inevitable expression of the endless variety in the people themselves, not just the obvious differences between, say, Swedes and Italians but also between Prussian INTRODUCTION