Brussels

The bilingual capital of Belgium and of Europe, a city built on a slope with a lower town of markets and guilds and an upper town of palaces on the hill. At its heart the Grand Place, often called one of the most beautiful squares in Europe, was rebuilt in gilded Baroque stone within a few years of the French bombardment of sixteen ninety-five, its guild houses raised out of catastrophe. Nearby the boy fountain of Manneken Pis and the glass-roofed Royal Galleries keep the small pleasures of the old city, while up the hill the Royal Palace, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, the antiques square of the Sablon and the colossal Palais de Justice mark the town of power, whose nineteenth-century grandeur is bound up soberly with the colonial history of King Leopold the Second. Read the phoenix city at your own pace.