Belgian chocolatier Pierre Marcolini has been crowned the world’s best pastry chef by a jury of independent reporters, enhancing Belgium’s reputation as a producer of top class chocolate.
Tag Archives: Belgium
New Walking Tour Video: ‘Bruges, Belgium’ (2020)
We recorded this 4k ultra hd video during our trip to Bruges, Belgium on August 2020. Bruges (Brugge in Dutch) is located in the northwest corner of Belgium and is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders. It is a mere 44 km from Ghent to the southeast and 145 km from Brussels.
The medieval center of Bruges is remarkably well preserved and is a UNESCO world heritage site. Bruges had its golden age around 1300 when it became one of the most prosperous cities of Europe. Our guided walking tour is about 1.55 miles (2.5 km) long, starts at Burg Square and covers most attractions and historic sites of Bruges.
Video Timeline Links: 00:00 – Bruges, Belgium Walking Tour Intro 03:56 – Burg Square 05:27 – Basilica of the Holy Blood 10:29 – Market Square (Grôte Markt) 11:32 – Provincial Court 13:04 – Historium Bruges 15:50 – Belfry of Bruges 22:30 – Simon Stevin Statue 25:55 – St. Salvator’s Cathedral 36:39 – Church of Our Lady 42:40 – Memling Museum 50:05 – Bonifacius Bridge 54:33 – Groeninge Museum
European News Podcast: ‘Can Belgium Survive?’
After nearly 500 days of negotiations, Belgium finally has a national government. It consists of seven parties but excludes the two biggest – both Flemish nationalist parties. Is Belgium’s complex political system workable in the long term?
And can the country hold together? Andrew Mueller asks Régis Dandoy, Carl Devos and Barbara Moens.
Timelapse Travel Videos: ‘Changing Seasons’ In Flanders, Belgium (2020)
Filmed and Edited by: Jarne Buttiens (Stills & Motion)
A short timelapse film showcasing the extraordinary transformations in nature throughout the seasons. Captured in and around Flanders, Belgium.
Music: ‘Into the Moonlight’, ‘Childhood Memories’ and ‘One Step Further’ by Reasy
Timelapse Travel Video: “Flower Carpet – Brussels” By Joerg Daiber (2020)
Filmed and Edited by: Joerg Daiber
Two years ago I shot a film about Brussels for visit.Brussels and I ended up editing a separate film from the Flower Carpet since I had quite a bit of footage and only a few shots made it into the film. The idea was to release this film in 2020 when the next Flower Carpet event in Brussels takes place. Well, you can guess how that is going. Of course the event has been cancelled, but until the next one takes place you can enjoy the awesomeness here.
Podcast Profiles: Author Georges Simenon, Creator Of Inspector Maigret (LRB)
London Review of Books’ John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about Georges Simenon, whose output was so prodigious that even he didn’t know how many books he wrote.
TRANSCRIPT
Thomas Jones: Hello, and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and today I’m talking to John Lanchester, who’s written a piece in the current issue of the LRB about Georges Simenon and his 75 Maigret novels, which Penguin have just finished reissuing in new translations. Hello, John.
John Lanchester: Hi Tom. Thanks for having me.
TJ: Thank you for joining me. And I thought we could begin where you begin your piece with Simenon’s ‘colossal output’, as you put it, and that nobody knows how many books he actually wrote, though it was probably more than four hundred, which is fewer than Barbara Cartland, but still puts the rest of us to shame.
JL: He didn’t half crack on, that’s true. Yes, he started as a young man in Liège, his home town in Belgium. And he got a job as a reporter on the local paper. I think he was not quite 16, which is properly strange. It’s like something out of a high concept kid’s TV show, you know, Georges Simenon – Boy Reporter, and very early on latched onto the idea of making money through writing.He began writing when he was 18, his first book came out when he was 19. He started writing every sort of potboiler, thrillers, romances, sort of semi-porn westerns, things like that, at an absolutely astounding rate of productivity. And his target was eighty pages a day, typewritten, and even on the assumption that the pages … I mean, a short page would be 150 words and it could well have been more, but it was 10,000 words a day, and he did that every single day. And then he’d write eighty pages, and then he’d go and be sick. Just from the physical and mental exertion and the strain. That was in the morning. And then he’d recover and do a bit of light reading and pottering about. And then the next day he did the same again, over and over and over for about seven years. And in that period, as you’ve mentioned, we don’t know exactly how many, because he forgot, and he had multiple pseudonyms. The main one being Georges Sim, which was how he was known when he began writing the Simenon novels. People thought that Simenon was a pseudonym because George Sim was so well known, but he seems to have written about 150 or more books in this seven-year burst. It makes you feel peculiar even to think about what that must have been like.
Art: “The Lives Of Rubens” Through 17-Century Biographies (The Getty)
Peter Paul Rubens was among the most influential artists in 17th-century Europe. Despite a childhood marred by a scandal that landed his father in prison, Rubens rose to become not only a prominent court painter in the Spanish Netherlands but also a lauded diplomat who worked across Western Europe.
With countless biographies written about the artist and exhibitions of his work continuing into the present day, the legacy of this Flemish Baroque artist is hard to overstate.
In this episode, Getty curator Anne Woollett discusses the life of Rubens through 17th-century biographies by three authors: Giovanni Baglione, Joachim von Sandrart, and Roger de Piles.
For images, transcripts, and more, visit getty.edu/podcasts.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish artist and diplomat. He is considered the most influential artist of Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens’s highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history.
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