The Romantic Road I - Wurzburg, Germany
There wasn’t much I could think of as being romantic in Germany. Not with their well-known efficiency and orderliness, their fast Porches and BMW’s, or their harsh-sounding mother tongue particularly loud when swaying jugs in overflowing beer gardens. So when I discovered a whole section on the Romantic Road in my Germany Lonely Planet, it was hard to sit still.
Ed and I soon realized this was not to be taken lightly as this so-called Romantic Road traversed 350 km’s down the middle of the history-enriched state of Bavaria. So we took Friday off work, booked a car in Frankfurt and made sure it was equipped with a good GPS.
And so began our trip down the Romantic Road. After we finally managed to turn the car on (German cars require you have your foot on the clutch for ignition) we headed towards the city of Würzburg. The road was flushed with a bright opus of ginger, amber and cinnamon announcing the proud presence of Autumn, in case anyone dared to forget. Anything could be romantic in a setting like this, but apparently, it was not the literal meaning of the word ‘romantic’ we had to pay attention to, but rather the 18th century intellectual and artistic movement known as Romanticism. There’s a difference.
Romanticism had to do with emotion as a source of art, music, and literature; a harsh contrast against the scientific rationalization of the Enlightenment period. Romantics weren’t only looking at emotions such as love and happiness for inspiration, but also horror, fear, and anguish. In music it is translated in the emotive symphonies of Beethoven and Mozart, in literature the Gothic works of Edgar Allan Poe or Mary Shelley, and in art it was the epic images of Delacroix and Goya.
Romantics sought the tranquillity of nature and quiet fields, and fantasised of epic tales and far away lands with heroes and heroines from different times. You might call them day dreamers, but it was in this day dreaming that the ideals that fuelled the French Revolution were born. And so this is the sentiment that roams free in the Romantic Road in Bavaria, with idyllic landscapes and rustic scenes of a laid back life in the mountains, mused by reverie and dreamscapes.
We reached the opulent city of Würzburg where a cold day was rising and people were out and about hurrying with breakfast in one hand, paper in the other. The marketplatz was already filled with little stalls selling small Christmas trees and wreaths, ceramic angels and wooden toy soldiers, woven baskets and rainbow candy canes. The smell of pretzels fresh out of the oven hung low in the air as if beckoning its perfect companion: a cup of hot chocolate. The marine curves of Rococo ornaments decorated facades and doors, windows and roofs, in extraordinary and unusual pastel colors. continue...
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