Power and privilege

This is your historian speaking! Ok, you find yourself on an expensive package tour down the Rhine for a week - expect castles, cathedrals, merchant houses and city halls. The easily accessible physical and narrative fragments of our pasts are so often those constructed, kept and handed on by the strong and resource-full. That said, I'm not immune to Romanticism, and fully savoured the architecture, the craftsmanship, the artefacts and the stories...
Images: Strasbourg's cathedral towering; Heidelberg castle - a misty time!

Our guides mostly began their tales of European cities with Roman military settlement. [ If  you're interested in artefacts and archaeology the Romisch-Germanisches (Romano-German) Museum next to Cologne Cathedral is definitely worth a visit.] Unsurprisingly for a region where borders have been very moveable, politics, religion and shifts in the balance of power figured strongly in the guide-talk. And who was nominally responsible for the push at the time: Caesars, generals and popes; Louis XVI, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler. All of interest, but made even more so by comparison - easy to pick underlying national loyalties by which despoiler was or wasn't mentioned!

To be fair, the guides were well informed in the heritage genre, and intelligent. The most balanced recounting came from our guides in the centre of European governance, Strasbourg. The morning was memorable for a personal family history told by a woman whose great grandmother, grandmother and mother had lived through a club sandwich of regimes in the 19th and 20th centuries: French, German, French, German, French. You can imagine the strength of feeling of earlier generations, but this person was a proud resident of a city at work on peaceful resolutions, and her children call themselves European.

Tantalising tastes. I'm very keen to go back to Europe, independently, and spend considerably more than a week feasting from a wider menu!