Town planning of the Renaissance

Medieval cities were often somewhat impromptu in their structure. They grew semi-spontaneously, despite attempts to regularise them - for instance the bastides, grid-based towns around a central square, in southern France. (Winchelsea, a town founded by Edward I of England, is also a bastide, though it's almost a ghost town - it began to shrink once the sea receded and its port trade disappeared.)

But the Renaissance brought new ideas of architecture and in particular, the idea that towns and cities should be planned to create harmonious and functional spaces where citizens could function. The square was no longer just an area without buildings, and the street no longer simply a thoroughfare; components were given meaning and dignity.

So we see, for instance, the Place des Vosges and Place Royal in Paris being created; Michelangelo refocusing the scattered medieval buildings of the Capitoline Hill into a centralised, symmetrical composition and planning a pavement which would integrate the whole into a geometrical and, perhaps, cosmological pattern. We see the creation of huge straight streets giving immense vistas in Baroque Rome. (Even London got St James's Square, but the City remained resistant to the new trends and still has most of its medieval street network.)

But there's a feeling that most of this town planning was done for the wealthy, or for the commune as a whole. It didn't touch the lives of the working class or even the middle classes, much.

Well in Nuremberg, it did.  The 'Sieben Zeilen' were built for weavers in 1489, timber framed houses arranged on what looks like seven rungs of a ladder between two diverging streets. It's an early town planning grid and though the houses look vernacular medieval - you can imagine them in any medieval town - the placement is typically Renaissance.

And these are lovely, big houses, with plenty of light (important for weavers, of course) and space around them.

It reminds me a little of the weavers' houses in London's Spitalfields, tall Georgian houses with huge penthouse windows at the top to let in light for the looms.  Here too the weavers weren't poor workers - they were moderately wealthy entrepreneurs.

Travel as art

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has a Richard Long retrospective.

I've known Long's work for a while and love it. He takes not so much landscape, but the land itself as his subject - mud, twigs, the process of walking. "Throwing muddy water" uses mud splashes on the wall to create a triptych of enigmatic symbols. "A line made by walking" is simply a photograph - in black and white, starkly reductive - of a straight line path made in a muddy field.

There's something quite meditative about these works. The subject is the artist's interaction with the landscape, the soil, the natural materials. We see how the mud has been thrown, squelched, left to dry. There's an element of time; Long exposes natural forces such as gravity, erosion. He opens up, in small, a vista on to geological time and infinite space (it reminds me of the way Tennyson sometimes does this in his poetry, a tiny lyric opening up into a whole universe).

Perhaps it's because his work is to do with time that so many of his works are represented by photographs. They're not intended to be permanent. Their impermanence is part of their meaning. And yet they are strangely permanent, decisive in their effect; a straight line marked on a field, a decision made, which will never be reversed; even when the trodden path has long been eroded, the mark of that work of imagination, that engagement with the landscape, is ineradicable.

For anyone interested in long distance hiking as a mode of spirituality and engagement with the earth, rather than simply an olde worlde way of getting from A to B, Richard Long's work is an essential reference.

More fun hotel stays

NH Hoteles is refurbishing one of its Madrid hotels.

30  individuals are being selected for the amusing task of trashing its 146 rooms between now and September, when the hotel reopens - presumably with new decor.

I think this is even better than the goldfish (blogged earlier). A chance to indulge in real rock star behaviour.

A pity this isn't a regular offer...

Listen to the poor busker!

Buskers are a varied breed. Some are tuneless Bob Dylan impersonators of little talent; I even suspect some of being tone deaf. Others are true professionals; I've known members of major orchestras supplement their income this way, as well as music students and jazz bands. (Rockers and rappers seem not to busk; I wonder if their sound equipment just isn't portable enough.)

There's a marvellous busker in Salzburg. Go through the arches from the Franziskanerkirche into Domplatz and he'll be there, most days, playing accordion. Yes, the obligatory Mozart, of course, but also some rarities - a lovely piece by François Couperin, Les Rozeaux, which has never sounded so good on a harpsichord. He plays with real emotion as well as technical sureness - this is another of those free concerts you can be lucky enough to find.

Yet most people walked past without noticing. In the fifteen minutes or so that I sat and listened, only two other people stopped to hear. The rest just treated it as muzak.

There's not really a moral here. But I wonder why so many people pass up on the riches that life delivers for free?

Free concerts

I've had some marvellous free 'concerts' recently.

First in St Giles' cathedral, Edinburgh,  where a young lad was playing the Rieger organ.  Subtle, that instrument is not! But it's massive, and rather great, and he was pretty good, too.

And then at the east end of Regensburg cathedral, where the 'Domspatzen' were having their rehearsal on Sunday morning, and had left the door open because of the heat. I sat down on a step nearby and listened for half an hour or so.

It's nice when you get a spontaneous free concert like that. But more formal free concert opportunities are also worth looking out for. Many churches in the City of London have a free lunchtime concert - St Anne and St Agnes in Gresham Street does; it also has a Bach Vespers many Sundays, at six, with professional musicians performing Bach cantatas as part of the liturgy. Very highly recommended.

Church services aren't always a musical feast. But most English cathedrals, and the major Oxford and Cambridge colleges, have good choirs providing regular sung services. Watch out though as they have one day a week off. For instance at King's, Monday is a day off, and on Wednesday you will hear only men's voices - that is, the boys are not singing. King's also offers an organ recital on Saturdays at 630 pm, with free admission.

In Paris, Saint-Eustache has a monstrously capacitous organ and there are regular free recitals, at 530 every Sunday; Saint-Merri and the American Church (each Sunday at 5) also stage free gigs in summer.

Lightshows

I wish I had been in Vienna in November 2006 - that's when this fantastic light show was created on the facade of the Karlskirche by two artists, Heiko Hofer and Alexander Nickl.  (Needs Quicktime to run.)

This year, the same artists are lighting up the Essl art museum in Klosterneuburg. This isn't gentle son et lumiere - it's garish, geometrical, utterly wicked. Like looking at buildings through a kaleidoscope.

Conservation tourism (2)

I blogged before about how conservation of historical monuments can in itself be a tourist attraction.

The Karlskirche in Vienna is a particularly interesting example.  The church is under restoration, partly filled by a skeleton of steel scaffolding reaching up into the dome. A lift takes visitors up to a platform under the dome, for a close up view of Rottmayr's wonderfully dynamic paintings. Then you can - if you're so inclined and have a head for heights - make your way up a rather wobbly staircase into the lantern right at the top.

The entry fee is a steep 6 euros -  but for this amazing chance to see the paintings from close up, it's worth it.