Category Archive: TRAVEL
Bayreuth Scenes
Bayreuth Hermitage
(August 2026) Bayreuth is charming, even if you are not attending the Festival. Whilst it is situated in Bavaria, many locals prefer to call themselves ‘Franconian.’ The town dates from the 10th Century AD and still has various historic guilds flagged in the ancient mall, but many venerable buildings were, to use Graham Greene’s phrase, “bombed about a bit” in WWII. We stayed at Liebesbier Urban Art Hotel at Andreas-Maisel-Weg 1, on a large site that features the historic brewery “Maisel & Friends.” That has a bar and restaurant at which we spent many happy hours, before and after the…
Continue Reading →Sir John Soane’s House
(13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London – 12 September 2026) John Soane (10 September 1753 – 20 January 1837), an architect, filled his crowded house with pieces of art collected over the course of a long life. Marshal Blücher arrived with his army, as he had promised, on the afternoon of Sunday 18 June 1815, and helped Wellington defeat Napoleon at Waterloo.
Continue Reading →Goethe in the Haus
(Großer Hirschgraben 23-25, Innenstadt, Frankfurt, 22 August 2026) The ‘German Shakespeare’ – poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre-director, and critic – was born in this house on 28 August 1749 and here he learned to “storm and stress,” writing works including The Sorrows of Young Werther (regarded as the world’s first ‘best seller’) and initial drafts of his sublime Faust. Faust Part One was published in 1808; Part Two was only completed before his death on 22 March 1832, and published posthumously. The original was destroyed by WWII bombs but was re-constructed from 1947 to 1951. It originally looked like this: There…
Continue Reading →Städel Museum
(Frankfurt, 22 August 2026) The Städel (1817, new building 1878, war damage repaired 1966), officially the Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie as rendered in monumental German, (named after Johann Friedrich Städel, who left his collection to the city) is on the south bank of the River Main and houses an impressive array of art, ranging from the sublime to the rather ridiculous. In 1937, 77 paintings and 700 prints were removed as “degenerate.” TVC deprecates a lot of modern art (i.e. https://www.thevarnishedculture.com/more-from-the-post-eternal-phase/) but we’d never expunge anyone’s effort, no matter how far short it fell. In 1939, the collection of the…
Continue Reading →Wahnfried
(19 August 2026) Quoth Richard Wagner: “Here where my delusions have found peace, let this place be named Wahnfried.” Haus Wahnfried was a brisk walk from our hotel, on the corner of Richard-Wagner-Sraße and Wahnfried Staße, and includes a modern renovated building containing costumes, dioramas and other artefacts from Wagner’s operas, together with the villa itself, renovated after WWII and supplemented by further work after Wolfgang and Winifred Wagner gave Wahnfried to the city of Bayreuth in 1973. Financed by King Ludwig II (his bust fronts the house), Wahnfried was built from 1872 to 1874. Wagner and his family moved…
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