The first time we’ve shown you the outside of Chateau de Vincenne’s lovely cathedral, though in this series we’ve shown you its inside a few times already. 🙂
Another ode to lovely mornings by the Seine to begin…and then to business lol. A few days ago we promised to reveal how many bridges are in that photo from right next to my home in Amsterdam. There are three bridges within the frame of the photo, though in fairness only one of them is easy to discern in the bottom foreground of that photo, given its vantage point. I’ve photographed all three bridges in photos below, now from the perspective of my windows 15 storeys up. For reference, the photo I shared before was taken from the far right side of the first image below, looking towards Sloterplas and the third bridge which you can see below right, i.e. a bit below and left of anything you can see in the first image below. The second bridge is easily visible below left, and the first bridge is on the far right-center of the left-hand photo below, though what you see easily here is just the road surface as it crosses the mini canal en route to that street and construction site to my north. 🙂
Tap or click the individual images below to see them full size, if you want to make more sense of it. And since I’m linking Paris & Amsterdam in one post here and it’s the 750th anniversary of Amsterdam, we’ll do a wee historical ‘did you know?’ By and large NL (and trade-wealthy Amsterdam) managed to remain free of French dominion for hundreds of years, once in fact by purposely flooding fields to keep the ‘Sun King’ out. Only once did they succumb, to iced-over fields and Bonaparte. Who was himself beaten three times later on, first by the self-liberating humans formerly called slaves in Haiti, and then twice a decade and more later, by the English-Austrian-Dutch etc. coalition. Ah, the wheels of history.
And we’ll wrap up this week of bridges with two posts from Paris, where we began it all. This one’s all from Chateau de Vincennes. Its 700-year-old keep (above, with protective drawbridge) was built here well outside the city limits, at a time when France’s kings were feeling a bit vulnerable after a capture by the English and some demonstrations by angry peasants – most likely about the tendency of France’s wealthy dictatorial hereditary rulers’ tendency to underestimate the difficulty average people faced in feeding their families – near their city palaces.
First of several posts we’ll share from the Chateau de Vincennes, abutting Bois de Vincennes to the east of Paris. What you see here is the keep in the foreground – completed in the 1300s under Charles V, when French kings were feeling vulnerable after one of them had been captured by the English, and others made uncomfortable by public demonstrations and protests too close for comfort to their palace in the heart of the city. In the background you see parts of the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes, completed in the 1500s under Henri II but begun under Charles V in the 1300s. Lots of interruptions due to wars, money troubles and even a brief occupation by the English Henry V after his troops won the battle of Agincourt – and in fact it seems he died here at Vincennes, another “who knew” moment. Below you see some of the classical palaces built later: more on that later :-).
(so much world, so little time....) 