OSHER IN COLUMBIA: MONDAY MORNINGS, FBRUARY 23 TO MAY 11, 2026

ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS    
CLASSES:    [1]    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]    [8]    [9]    [10]    [11]

 
A Sense of Place: Ten European Cities

Although this may look like a travel blog, it is really intended as a course in Cultural Geography. Why is it that certain cities have a strong sense of character, while others don't? I think we shall find it to be the product of several factors: the way the city relates to its surrounding region; its history as reflected in its architecture and traditions; and above all the way it has been depicted in art, literature, and music.

All the same, the ten cities that I shall present are very much a personal selection. When I first proposed this topic, I was thinking of looking at regions as well as cities, and in several different continents. But I realized that this would be too diffuse, so I decided to concentrate only on cities, only in Europe, and only places I had visited myself. The way a place affects us also depends on the viewpoint we bring to it. Before taking on my present role as a de facto cultural historian, I have had a short career in art history and a much longer one in music and theater. A few of these cities I know only as an ordinary traveler, but most of them I have visited wearing one or other of my professional hats.

So each description below begins with a sentence or two about my personal connection to the city, because it may be useful to know where I am coming from. But this is just about the last you will hear about my travels; still less will we be leafing through the Brunyate travel album. Instead, I hope to talk about objective matters that can be appreciated by everyone: history, geography, and above all the works in various arts that these cities have inspired.

I have chosen the images below because I like them; they do not necessarily reflect the focus of each class. One by one, I will add RESOURCES for each session, at which point the current GREY LINKS will be activated and turn GOLD. Roger Brunyate.

	February 23
Three city maps against a street map of Manhattan	RESOURCES

1. Three Home Towns

Let's introduce our study of Europe with three great cities here in the United States: New Orleans, Washington DC, and Chicago. Each has a distinct character, making it a tourist destination. How is this character presented in promotional videos? How much does it reflect the history, location, and commerce of each place? And how is the character enshrined: in the layout and architecture of the city, in the lives of the inhabitants, or in the arts produced there? The answers should give us a checklist of questions that we can apply to the European cities later in the course.

	March 2
A canal in Bruges	RESOURCES

2. Bruges: the Dead City?

Bruges is the only city in the course that I have visited only once, but it left an indelible impression. It is sometimes called "the Venice of the North," but to float on its canals feels like a journey into the past. Not for nothing did Korngold write an opera about it called The Dead City; it can feel as if it had never entered the present. Yet those grey walls and stone churches contain many of the brightest creations of Renaissance art, brilliant paintings that reflect its erstwhile importance as a thriving center of trade in the 15th century, the partner and to some extent the master of those great cities of Italy we shall visit in the coming weeks.

	March 9
Florence from the air, including the Duomo	RESOURCES

3. Florence: Cradle of the Renaissance

I have visited Florence many times as a student and then teacher of art history, once as an apprentice opera director, and once as an ordinary tourist. It is one of the comparatively few cities I know where one can walk in the streets, ignore the offices and cafes, and immerse oneself entirely in the aura of its dominant period, the 1400s or quattrocento. Yet its heritage is longer and more persistent. Its red roofs nestle in the cradle of the surrounding hills. Brunelleschi's Renaissance dome surmounts a cathedral begun over a century earlier; Dante Alighieri, its most famous poet, was born earlier still. And a century or more after its artistic heyday, Florence would become the birthplace of my own art-form, opera.

	March 16
A side canal in Venice	RESOURCES

4. Venice: City of Contrasts

My parents took me to Venice as a child; I have to admit that I was totally confused and took refuge in a cinema showing a Charlie Chaplin film. Nowadays it would be even worse; the crowds in Venice are an epidemic blight. And yet it is still possible to find oneself in a deserted side canal and understand the morbid fascination of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now. And there are reasons to endure the claustrophibia and hassle. Venice remains one of the great art capitals of the world, from the Bellinis and Titians in churches and museums to the Biennales that showcase the most innovative contemporary art. Venetians were the first ever publishers of music, and the sounds of Gabrieli and Vivaldi can still be heard in its churches. And the unique Venetian light has enthralled artists from Canaletto and Guardi to Turner and Monet.

	March 23
Bridge of the Angels and Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome	RESOURCES

5. Rome: City of the Centuries

Rome is another city that took a lot of getting used to. I went there first as a former student of the classics. I went again to study for my university course on the High Renaissance. I went again to prepare classes on baroque architecture. None of these visits were wasted; the city is still ground-center for Roman remains, and the Vatican is a must-see for Michelangelo and Raphael. But these things take some winkling out. It was not until I understood something of the baroque that I could make sense of Rome as a whole: its layout, its decoration, its fountains, and effects of light. Even the infuriating traffic can be seen as part of the baroque fascination with constant movement.

	March 30
The Vienna Opera	RESOURCES

6. Vienna: Musical Mecca

The picture shows the Vienna Opera, one of the premier opera houses of the world. It is a 19th-century creation, but Vienna was on the operatic map for a century before that at least, with the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Gluck. The city was also the birthplace of Johann Strauss and hence of operetta and the waltz. And composers like Schoenberg and Webern of the Second Viennese School turned music on its head in the 20th century. My own visits to Vienna, however, were nominally as an art historian; I spent long days in its incomparable museums. Yet what really sticks with me are the evenings: opera, operetta, or music in cafes, all imbibed at the source.

	April 13
A canal basin in Amsterdam (photo RB)	RESOURCES

7. Amsterdam and the Golden Age

Amsterdam, like Rome, is another city I truly got to know only when my head of department decided to assign me a new course, the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam, like several other towns in Holland, has a very distinctive architecture, with tall houses built in rows along canals, and since 17th-century Dutch painters specialized in a realistic depiction of everyday life, there is a close correlation between what you see on the gallery walls and the townscape around you. I have also been to several concerts at the magnificent Concertgebuow; Amsterdam is the only city I know where a concert ticket will get you free fares on a streetcar before and after each concert.

	April 20
Edinburgh from Calton Hill	RESOURCES

8. Edinburgh, Old and New

Seen from Glasgow, where I lived for five years, Edinburgh was the more glamorous (but colder) city on the other side of the neck of Scotland. I went through for shows, wrote occasional reviews for the Edinburgh newspaper, and had my first two professional jobs in opera there. I now have family there, so Edinburgh is one place I always go when I am back in the UK. It is a striking city, an amalgam of two quite different styles: the medieval city stretching up the spine of rock that culminates in the Castle, and the Georgian New Town, cascading in elegant terraces betweeen the old town and the River Forth. It is also the national capital, the site of the annual Edinburgh Festival, and home to some of the best museums in Britain.

	April 27
Bridges in Paris	RESOURCES

9. Paris, the Capital of Europe

For a Brit of my generation, Paris is, so to speak, the Capital of Abroad. French is our first foreign language, and virtually every trip to the continent begins there. My university thesis in art history involved three weeks of study at the Louvre, and I have been back many times since. The city has unmatchable resources in theatre, ballet, and opera, and was home to virtually all the major French writers. It is also remarkable in having preserved such clear mementos of so many different historical periods: the age of Louis XIV, the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the belle époque, and some remarkable innovations in the modern age. This is going to be an easy class to give, but a hard one to focus—though of course I'll try.

	May 4
St. James' Park and Whitehall, London	RESOURCES

10. London, as a Living Schoolroom

Though I grew up in Ireland, my aunt's house in Chelsea was my home from home when I couldn't get back. She organized my first trips to orchestral concerts and the ballet. Most of my grounding in opera took place in the gallery at Covent Garden, sometimes as often as twice a week, when I was teaching in London during my gap year. I lived there for four years when I became a professional opera director; we had a house in Blackheath, on the hill above the magnificent constellation of buildings at Greenwich, which are like a time-capsule of British history. London itself is full of such time-capsules, but they are all cheek-to-jowl, medieval rubbing shoulders with Georgian and so much else. But if I were to focus on any one period, it would be the Victorian era that gave rise to those magnificent government buildings, the splendid parks, and the ambitious cultural complex at South Kensingon founded by Prince Albert that includes the Victoria and Albert Museum (in whose library I worked) and the Royal Albert Hall, site of the nightly BBC Promenade Concerts throughout the summer.

	May 11
Georgian houses in Merrion Square, Dublin	RESOURCES

11. Dublin, and the Other Ireland

My wife still wears the engagement ring we bought in Dublin all those years ago, but that was far from my first visit. Growing up in grey postwar Belfast, Dublin was the bright city a short train ride away, free from rationing, and filled with laughter. But it is the one city in this course that I have never visited in any professional capacity. It was only gradually that I became aware of its long tradition in folklore and myth, the darker side of the elegance of the English ascendancy, and the heroic Irish struggle for independence. It was later that I got to know the plays by Yeats and Synge, and saw them at their source, and later still that I read Joyce's Ulysses, where the city is the virtual hero. It may be the one city here where I feel the most need to return, to piece together all that I know now with what I can see on the ground.

 
Return to top

 
Site hosted by DreamHost