We caught the train at 9am and alighted at Odeon Place, where a classical music concert had taken place the night before. We looked at it on the internet yesterday morning and seats were 45 euros each so gave it a miss. There were a massive number of seats still there ready for another concert tonight.
We saw a photo of a venue where Mozart once performed, but we were never sure we actually visited the spot. As we walked to the entrance of the Residenz, we noticed there were three types of facade on the building. There was the printed fabric hung over the scaffolding wherever repairs were in progress.Then there were sections of original shaped stonework. It seemed to us that the other sections were damaged in the Second World War and were rebuilt in concrete and lines painted on it to resemble the original. Can you see the difference in this photo?
We came in the main entrance to the Residenz again and found it much quieter than yesterday so we were glad we could face up to the 90 rooms without the crowds. We picked up out audio guides and stepped out into the first courtyard which featured a gruesome statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa with fountain water spurting out of both parts of her severed neck.
This courtyard featured a grotto type altar which was made entirely of shells of different types an sizes, thousands and thousands of them.
You have to see it up close to believe that everything except the statue of Mercury and the table top is made from shells. The first two photos show only the centre part of the wide wall. the third one shows the left hand side. As we walked through the remaining halls and rooms we were stunned by the opulence and craftsmanship and extensiveness of the palace. When we walked through the royal yacht Brittania we thought it was a little over the top, but this was something else again. Three antichambers for different purposes on the way into the king's huge bedroom. Hundreds of tapestries too large to hang on a wall less than 4 meters high. After about 10 large rooms and corridors we came to the meeting hall which was as big as most town halls, but just another one of the 90 rooms.
It was full of Latin proverbs extolling virtues, making it a kind of church of classical antiquity. I was taken with the last one "fides certior ratione" or faith is more certain than reason. That's a good one to start an argument with the humanists. There was a large chapel for worship by the court but also a private one which was only small but the richest room in the palace.
All surfaces were marble and precious stones were evident everywhere. To the royals though the most precious content of the rooms were the relics of the cross and bones of biblical characters as these were seen to be able to strengthen the prayers to the saints made in the room. In the entertainment room there was a cute little pipe organ.
We could have taken dozens of photos of amazing rooms but our feet were tiring and we lost our enthusiasm as we became habituated to the environment and readers of the blog would no doubt end up the same way if we tried to cover the who;e place. We had to be reminded that quite a lot of the building was bombed (very naughty) in the war and not all of it had so far been restored. This room has been partially restored:
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| BEFORE AND AFTER |
The only way to grasp the size of the buiding was to study the model. It is in the central part of the town surrounded by other buildings and streets, so it is unusual in having no exterior moat or gardens. that was not the end, however. We had only seen The Museum of Treasures and the royal living quarters. There was one more section of the Residenz that is open to the public and it only took us a few minutes to visite it. The performance theatre designed by Cuvillie and restored by the Siemens company for current use:
Ideal also for use in period movies.
Back to the Central Station via underground and onto a tram to Nymphenburg to look at a quite different sort of palace.
This is the front yard from the street. About two thirds of it was as much as would fit in the shot.
And this is the backyard as seen from the ballroom balcony. We thought we were in Versailles. There are at least 10 square kilometers of garden here originally set aside for the royals to enjoy hunting hoildays. Nowadays it is surrounded by suburbia and is used for jogging and cycling by the locals. It is much bigger than Centennial Park in Sydney and much quieter. Inside we were only allowed to see about twenty rooms and they were similar to the ones at the Residenz but not quite as opulent.
This was a fair example of the rooms we saw. We went for a walk around the perimeter of the garden
and found two of the special purpose buildings that the royals visited from time to time. This was the hunting lodge. They had a private bath which was more like an indoor swimming pool.
Cleopatra would have had a hard time filling that one with milk. Maybe Ernie could do it. We saw the Pavilion also:
By the time we got to the dam at the very back of the property we decided we had seen enough.
So we came out the back gate and hopped on a tram into the city and a train back to the hotel to reorient ourselves to 2012. After checking our train bookings we found the official had made two mistakes. One trip was a day early and another took us to Genova (Italy) instead of Geneva (Switzerland). Will fix that in the morning.
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