Morning Train to Munich
Early in the morning on July 2, I landed at Munich’s airport, the Flughafen München, following an 8 hour red-eye from Dulles. I had arranged to meet up with my son Alex in the late afternoon. He had been in Munich for several days. The airport is about 40 minutes from the city center and from my immediate destination, the Hauptbahnhof, or main train station. I took the train in from the airport. Knowing that Munich is a city of over two and a half million people, I soon wondered if I had gotten on the wrong train and was headed for some other city – maybe Nuremberg, or Berlin. Munich steadfastly refused to appear on the horizon. Even after arrival, Munich had the appearance of a town rather than a city.
After four hours of sleep in a silvery modernist hotel room well-lit by corner windows and a nice balcony, I went out into the rain to explore the city. Days are long in Munich in July. The air was cool but not cold and the rain came in well-spaced bands of downpour with intervals of misty drizzle.
Munich’s historic core is a roughly thirty-minute walking radius of the Frauenkirche, a postwar-restored Gothic-Baroque cathedral. It was Sunday so there was no shopping, but people came out to walk the town anyway. Munich is a beautiful city.
Frauenkirche steeples
Skyline with Frauenkirche
Pedestrian Mall
Neue Rathaus
St. Michael’s Church: A Baroque Response to the Reformation
St. Michael’s Church, an early Baroque masterpiece, shows the imperial past of Munich. A long list of Wittelsbach dynasts is memorialized there, starting at the end of the 16th century.
The rain squalls seemed to be spaced about one church apart. I next fled into the Peterskirche, the oldest Munich church, which was also repaired in the 20th century. The most interesting relic on display was the skeleton of Saint Munditia, inset with gold and jewels and dressed in silk netting. Munditia, martyred circa 300 AD, was originally entombed in the Cyriaca catacombs along the Via Tiburtina in Rome. She’d only been dead for 700 years when the Peterskirche was first built. She came to Munich as a Counter-Reformation gift in 1675.
The rain squalls seemed to be spaced about one church apart. I next fled into the Peterskirche, the oldest Munich church, which was also repaired in the 20th century. The most interesting relic on display was the skeleton of Saint Munditia, inset with gold and jewels and dressed in silk netting. Munditia, martyred circa 300 AD, was originally entombed in the Cyriaca catacombs along the Via Tiburtina in Rome. She’d only been dead for 700 years when the Peterskirche was first built. She came to Munich as a Counter-Reformation gift in 1675.
Photo byy Andrew Bossi - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2897314
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2897314
Young beheaded Munditia is an odd and somehow fascinating sight which would have raised the admiration of Edgar Allen Poe — seemingly the quintessence of decadent morbidity, but the survival of her remains in this condition is a clear miracle.
The rain momentarily stopped, so I left the Peterskirche for the Odeonplatz, where I was driven into the Feldherrnhalle and then the Theatinerkirche by the rain.
The rain momentarily stopped, so I left the Peterskirche for the Odeonplatz, where I was driven into the Feldherrnhalle and then the Theatinerkirche by the rain.
Feldherrnhalle
Theatinerkirche
Lions of the Feldherrnhalle
Allied bombing devastated Munich in the last great European war. The modern city would be inexplicable without this fact. The city was to some unassessable degree rebuilt to show its losses along with its past. No outsider or tourist is very likely to understand what today’s Muencheners really think about this. The Feldherrnhalle, an altar to war which was not hit by the bombing, is a reminder in stone that history is not blind and, unlike the nearby Unknown Soldier from the 1914-18 war, does not sleep.
Tomb of the Unknown, Asleep Since the Great War
The rain having paused, it seemed the time had come for a dash up Ludwigstrasse toward the university. However, before I could reach the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, the plaza where I was to meet Alex, the skies opened once again, and I took refuge in yet another huge church. This one reminded me of some of the abandoned churches of Brussels, except the door wasn’t locked. The vast interior was empty, dim, and not yet completely restored from its midcentury damage. Some interior walls were still faced in naked brick. In my drenched state I failed to appreciate this structure fairly. I retreated outside to the porch, and noted a classic example of heavy blast damage on the brickwork of the building across the street. Munich has lots of secret sights and odd corners. I later learned that this was St. Ludwig’s, the architecturally influential neo-Romanesque university parish church built by King Ludwig I in the early 19th century.
I could not realistically get wetter, so I resumed tramping through the downpour to the university. Finally I waited in the atrium of the main building, a lovely and well-used space, gradually steam drying, and also wondering if a person could catch any ancient diseases wandering around European cities in the rain without a handkerchief.
I could not realistically get wetter, so I resumed tramping through the downpour to the university. Finally I waited in the atrium of the main building, a lovely and well-used space, gradually steam drying, and also wondering if a person could catch any ancient diseases wandering around European cities in the rain without a handkerchief.
A convenient meeting place
Stately lecture halls
This turned out to be my favorite place and my favorite moment in Munich. LMU had the somewhat musty bookish odor that inevitably accompanies serious learning. The air was thick with residual determined thought. Waiting for Alex, I must have spent the best part of an hour reminiscing on my own college and grad school days haunting the Rotunda and the Alderman.
Then Alex showed up, it stopped raining and the sun came out. We walked through a corner of the Englischer Garten, certainly one of the finest public parks in the world.
Then Alex showed up, it stopped raining and the sun came out. We walked through a corner of the Englischer Garten, certainly one of the finest public parks in the world.
The Monopticon in the Englischer Garten
We went on to revisit the downtown area, after which we indulged ourselves in beer and sausages, sauerkraut and dumplings. Alex had been in Munich for days, I for hours. Neither of us had seen enough. Munich is a bewitching city, and if we had not had immediate plans a good hypothetical argument could have been made for spending the rest of the month in the sleek metallic hotel room I had stumbled into. But we had plenty of immediate plans: for instance, to cross the Alps. It was time to look for our elephant – which turned out to be a very nice blue Opel with lots of electronics and a good engine.
The Dolomite Alps
Geologists divide the Alps into over two dozen distinct mountain ranges. It is heartbreaking to encounter the Alpine Massif for the first time and realize that one must just as abruptly leave it. We chose an autobahn route across Austria, past Innsbruck and into Italy over the Brenner Pass, then turning off the main highway at Sciaves to Chiens and Dobbiaco, or Toblach. The route from Dobbiaco to Cortina D’Ampezzo would take us through a big unit of the Dolomitic Alps. The Dolomites began in Mesozoic times as a series of coral islands and the undersea sedimentation around them. This lost island-scape was edged into tectonic collision 65,000,000 years ago and has since ridden up over another geological plate to reach peak elevations of over 10,000 feet above current sea level.
The Alps rise abruptly. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
The road to Dobbiaco. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
The Alpine valleys of the Tirol, or Austrian and Italian Tirol as they currently are, have a long and complex history of independence and annexation. As landlocked islands in a sea of mountains, the valley systems have different traditions and local histories that disappear into the mists of time, different foods and specialties, and different dialects of Austrian, Ladino, or Italian. Driving through, however, one only senses that Tirolean custom is relaxed and familiar with visitors. It’s a bicyclers’ and hikers’ paradise in the summer.
A week or a month would be well spent here, for day hikes and short drives and general amazement. The paleness of the Dolomites reacts to light almost as readily as water. The mountains and lakes change color from minute to minute under the play of the clouds. We parked at Lago di Landro, or Dürrensee, and gradually worked our way on foot for a few miles into the Parco Naturale Tre Cime.
A week or a month would be well spent here, for day hikes and short drives and general amazement. The paleness of the Dolomites reacts to light almost as readily as water. The mountains and lakes change color from minute to minute under the play of the clouds. We parked at Lago di Landro, or Dürrensee, and gradually worked our way on foot for a few miles into the Parco Naturale Tre Cime.
Trailhead below Lago di Landro. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
We attain a certain elevation.
Exploring an unimproved jeep trail (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
The trail threatens to get severe (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
The view improves
This could go on indefinitely.
We found a natural limit to our perambulations, defined by the time needed drive to Belluno and the belief that we would want to look at Belluno when we got there. That is how we came to stand on the doorstep of Tre Cime, vow to return, and then drive away — southward through the famous resort of Cortina D’Ampezzo and the hill towns below Cortina, the road gripping the edge of one precipice after another and the hill towns gripping the road, each decaying town strung out onto its own promontory, natural fortresses most peculiar in the waning light.
Fortifications were already not scarce on our route. South European history has some resemblance to a Hobbesian war of all against all, and our route across Austria had already brought us past ancient stone forts, medieval castles, defensive Renaissance towers, walled villages, and finally World War One cement blockhouses. The road down into Italy revealed the same tendency to fortify, only more so.
Modern Belluno was a pleasant-seeming but unprepossessing stringbean-shaped town along the Piave River. Ancient Belluno, where we stayed, was built onto a promontory over the river and still retained some of its medieval and Renaissance fortifications.
Fortifications were already not scarce on our route. South European history has some resemblance to a Hobbesian war of all against all, and our route across Austria had already brought us past ancient stone forts, medieval castles, defensive Renaissance towers, walled villages, and finally World War One cement blockhouses. The road down into Italy revealed the same tendency to fortify, only more so.
Modern Belluno was a pleasant-seeming but unprepossessing stringbean-shaped town along the Piave River. Ancient Belluno, where we stayed, was built onto a promontory over the river and still retained some of its medieval and Renaissance fortifications.
Belluno: A Fortified Basilica. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
We looked with interest at the medieval and post-medieval overbuild on Belluno, knowing that below are ruins dating to Etruscan times and even earlier.
Belluno’s Old Gate. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
Belluno’s Downtown Gate. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
Belluno at Twilight (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
We See Our First Venetian Lion (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)
Former Palazzo in Good Company
We were now in the former domains of the Most Serene Republic, Venice, whose power once stretched up into the Alps. We had a pleasant dinner without a tourist in sight, excepting ourselves of course, went back to the hotel replenished, and slept very well.
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