Well I decided today would be my Museum day. You know trying to get some culture into this Italian Wanderer! (By the way, that’s what my kids came up for my Travel Blog screen name!)
So I started off in the Transportation Museum, which given Germany’s (and really all of Europe’s) reliance on trains, a vast majority of the exhibits were around all sizes and types of trains. My cousin Joe would have been in heaven! But they also had other things so since a lot of you liked that little red car from the other day I included a pic of this cute little red one. It was called a Goggomobil (could it have been another thing created by Google? Lol) but I’ve never heard of it. They also had this huge model train demo that was so big I couldn’t get it all into a picture but included part of it. At the top of every hour they would run all the trains for 15 mins thru the tunnels and across the mountain and valleys. It brought me back to the old days at Christmas watching my cousin Joe’s train set.
I then took one of the “free” walking tours of the city. It is free but they just ask that you give a donation at the end. It was really informative and was pretty close to the Rick Steves tour I took yesterday but with a lot more content. They told a funny story about the local sausages. So in most other German cities the sausages are very large like the Bratwursts and Kielbasa that we’re used to seeing. Well the ones in Nuremberg are these tiny little ones… and now I know why! Well legend has it that one of the most famous butchers in Nuremberg was accused of murder and put in jail. He claimed he didn’t do it and coined the phrase “fake news”! (OK, I just made that part up! Lol) But seriously, he told his apprentice butcher that he couldn’t live without his sausage so he had him make them into these tiny thin links small enough to fit thru the key hole to his cell so he could sneak them in. Thus began the creation of the tiny Nuremberg sausage!
I left there and went over to the Germanic National Museum. I figured if I’m going to spend a lot of my time in Germany, I should learn about the country. This place was massive and I couldn’t get thru all of it. It also had a lot of great paintings and sculptures. I thought this was interesting since yesterday I talked about that wood carving of the Annunciation… well today I come across this sculpture of what happened right after that. It’s called The Visitation. Right after she’s told she’s pregnant with Jesus, Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth who is also pregnant to probably get a few tips. Well Elizabeth is the one who gave birth to John the Baptist. Isn’t it cute how they showed the little babies in both their tummies (Mary’s on the left)?
One of the other cool things they had there was the oldest known globe in the world. A man named Martin Behaim lived in Portugal but returned to his home town of Nuremburg and had this globe made in 1492. While the official name was the Behaim globe the Knick name for it was an earth Apple! The globe showed only what they knew of the world based on Marco Polo’s explorations. Since this was in early 1492, there was no North or South America since it hadn’t been discovered yet. Small world as they say! Lol
My last stop was to the Historic Underground Art Bunker Museum. This showed how Nuremberg protected most of their art treasures as well as their people during World War II. They fortunately already had this vast cave system for storing beer available and they were bombed very late in the war so the citizens had time (and experience gained from already-bombed cities to the north) to prepare for the aerial attacks they knew would be coming. The artwork was not just stashed in the bunkers but carefully packed in wooden crates and padded with sandbags. It was also a climate controlled environment behind layers of thick fireproof doors so they were well protected. By the way, one of the pieces stored here was the Annunciation wood carving! (See how this all fits together! Lol) Most of the artwork stored there was from Nuremberg as well as the Holy Roman Empire jewels from the castle (pic) which ended up in Vienna after the war and I hope to see it when I visit there in about a month. But there were also pieces that had been plundered by the Nazis such as the Veit Stoss Altar from Krakow Poland. This piece went missing after the war but was recovered by the “Monuments Men” that the 2014 movie was based on.
Whew… OK, that’s all for now… did I lose some of you? Just think for those of you that actually read all this content and don’t just look at the pictures (I know who you are!), you’re going to be really well prepared for either your local Trivia night or maybe even Jeopardy! Lol.
TGIF to all!
Jeff
The Wandering Italian 