#i have to admit apple would have been harder to translate in german

[calebs-hangout-corner]

YOU 🤝 ME

TRANSLATE THE NAMES DAMMIT!!!!

They should have translated the names of the characters for the german translation of Ever After High because the original english names don't make sense when putting them in a german context in this essay I will--

[180abroad]

Day 169: Frankfurt

From a historical and economic perspective, Frankfurt is fascinating. It was one of the largest and most powerful cities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was where emperors were selected by an electoral college, and it was the home of the first trade fairs in Europe. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Frankfurt an epicenter of attempted democratic reform. Today, it remains one of the most important cities in Europe for trade and finance. It is home to the EU's central bank and one of Europe's largest stock exchanges. It's train station and airport are likewise among the busiest in all of Europe.

From a tourist perspective, Frankfurt is a bit odd. Despite being such an important city, the historical tourist quarter is quite small. Unlike Munich and Nuremberg, Frankfurt was rebuilt as a fully modern city after WWII, filled with gridded streets and steel skyscrapers. Just a few blocks around the medieval city hall and cathedral were preserved for posterity.  A few hours proved more than enough for us to feel that we had gotten a good taste.

Of course, it probably didn't help that we visited on a Monday, when most of the tourist shops and attractions were closed.

Yeah, we probably could have planned our visit better, but having planned every other part of the trip to the point of exhaustion, we tried to give ourselves the gift of going with the flow for once and just seeing what happened. I have to admit that it didn't come easily to me, and I constantly had to fight a rising frustration that we were missing out on things because we hadn't planned enough. We definitely did miss out on some cool things, but that's bound to happen no matter what.

After a calm hour-and-a-half train ride east from Oberwesel, we arrived at Frankfurt's central station. With plenty of time and very little planned, we decided to buy tickets for the City Sightseeing hop-on hop-off tour buses. It was a lot cheaper than it had been in London, but there was also a lot less to see.

The entire route took less than an hour, and the commentary track wasn't nearly as interesting--a lot of pointing out which banks owned which skyscrapers. More interestingly, we did get to appreciate the city's peculiar love of odd statuary.

Still, even if the bus tour was a little underwhelming, it was a nice way to get our bearings. Plus, it dropped us off right at the entrance to the city's historic core.

The first sight to greet us there was the red-brick Church of Saint Paul. Architecturally, it is interesting for being round rather than cross-shaped. Historically, it is interesting for being the site of Germany's first democratically elected parliament.

In 1848, a wave of democratic revolts surged across Europe from Ireland to Romania. Germany (then a confederation of largely independent states) was caught up as well, and Frankfurt became the epicenter of a movement to unite all of Germany into a single democratic nation. A provisional parliament was set up in the Church of St. Paul, and for a while its success seemed inevitable.

But as it so often happens, forming a government proved much harder than forming a revolution. The monarchs and aristocrats stood aside and bided their time while the provisional parliament endlessly bickered over the details of the proposed constitution. Eventually, the parliament collapsed under the weight of its own frustrations and disillusionment. Two decades later, Germany was instead unified under the autocratic rule of the King Wilhelm I of Prussia and his ruthless chief minister Otto von Bismarck.

The church was the first historic structure in the city to be repaired after WWII, and it was honored as a symbol of Germany's commitment to a democratic future.

Upstairs from the ground-floor museum is the church's main hall, a towering and impressively airy space that is now used for concerts instead of religious services. Along the circular wall hang the flags of Germany's 16 federal states.

Moving further into the old town, we soon reached Römerberg, the old town square. At one end stands the Römer building, which as served as the town hall since 1405. It was also where Holy Roman Emperors celebrated after being coronated at the nearby cathedral. Like everything else here, the Römer was almost entirely rebuilt after WWII. As far as we could tell, they did a great job.

At the center of the square stands a statue of Justice without a blindfold, keeping careful watch over the Römer. At least, it usually does. Today it seemed to have gone on vacation--whether voluntary or not, we couldn't say.

On the ground nearby, I found a bronze memorial for a Nazi book burning that took place in the square in 1933. Around the edges of the plaque reads a quote by the 19th-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Roughly translated, it reads: "The burning of books is but foreplay to the burning of people."

I wanted to say something about how chillingly prophetic those words proved to be, but of course they weren't prophetic at all. As we've learned by this point, the Nazis didn't do anything new; they just did it bigger and on camera.

The square was fairly quiet since it was a Monday and most of the tourist shops and exhibitions were closed. After getting a last look around, we headed over the two small blocks to Frankfurt Cathedral.

The cathedral, officially known as the Imperial Cathedral of St. Bartholomew, is a hulking Gothic construction of red stone. Despite the high vaulted ceilings, the atmosphere felt dark and heavy to me. One small but fun design element involved the walls.

See how the walls are made of cleanly cut and squared red stone? Look again.

The walls are actually covered in red plaster and painted with thin red lines to give the illusion of mortared stone. Apparently this was all the rage in medieval German church design.

The church has some beautiful art and altarpieces on display, but the real reason I was so interested to visit was a small room tucked behind a small door in a side chapel, so inconspicuous that I searched up and down the transepts twice before noticing someone going through it.

It was in this small room that the most powerful lords and clergy of the Holy Roman Empire would gather to each time it came to choose a new emperor. Granted, for most of that time it was little more than a rubber stamp to continue the Habsburg dynasty, but still. Imagine if, once in a generation, the governors of all 50 US states gathered to elect a new president for life in a dark little room like this.

Turning south, we walked a couple blocks down the river Main. Walking out onto the 19th-century wrought-iron Eiserner Steg bridge, we were treated to a wonderful view of the city skyline.

The rest of our visit was mostly spent shopping. Jessica had hoped to find a scarf for a somewhat niche German soccer team, but we never did find it. I had better luck at a Samsung store, where I picked up a USB adapter to replace one I'd lost at some point during the previous week. I also made a small detour to look at some pens.

For some reason I was under the impression that Faber-Castell was headquartered in Frankfurt, when actually it is headquartered in a castle just outside of Nuremberg. Still, it was fun to visit this little shop and admire some nice pens. Upstairs, we got to play with a set of watercolor pencils.

Nearby, there was also a broad square dominated by a statue of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt. I'd always just known of Goethe as the guy who wrote Faust, the iconic story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power.

In Germany, however, Goethe isn't any mere writer. Imagine Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci combined, but an even bigger deal--that's what Goethe is to Germany. Not only is Faust often credited as the greatest thing ever written in the German language, Goethe also dabbled extensively in science and philosophy in addition to writing an overwhelming volume of novels, plays, and poems.

Like Mozart, Goethe was a prodigy and recognized for his genius at a young age. Also like Mozart, Goethe spent pretty much all of his adult life far away from the home city that so proudly claims his legacy.

As we made our way back to the train station, we walked through a few blocks of clean, high-density skyscrapers, a lovely park, and then a grim half-mile of brothels and open-air drug use. There are three parallel streets leading from the train station into downtown Frankfurt, and apparently it makes a big difference which one you choose.

Back at the train station, we picked up a couple bottles of "apple wine," a local specialty for us to enjoy on the train ride back. It was basically a very dry, somewhat bitter cider, much like the cidre sec we had in Normandy.

One last bit of excitement for the day: For the most part, Deutsche Bahn--the German train service--was easily the most reliable of all the ones we used in Europe. Even the Swiss trains let us down by comparison. But as we waited for out train home to leave Frankfurt, the departure time came and went. There was some jolting and screeching, and some lights flickering on and off. And more time went by. Our glasses of apple wine were long finished. Then, a voice on the PA system announced something in German, and everyone bolted off the train. Naturally, we followed.

As it turned out, two cars of the train that needed to be separated had become locked together, and the engineers couldn't get them apart. So the speaker had told us to head over to the next train, which was leaving in just a few minutes--plenty of time for a prompt German traveler. Luckily, we had plenty of prompt German travelers to take our lead from.

Once on the new train, everything was back to clockwork, and we enjoyed a smooth hour and a half ride back to Oberwesel. We didn't get very good seats due to the last minute change. We spent the first twenty minutes or so on fold-down chairs in the bike storage area. The train emptied out quickly enough as we escaped the urban sprawl surrounding Frankfurt, however, and a quiet hour and a half later we were back home.

Overall, I probably wouldn't recommend visiting Frankfurt the way we did, but I'm still glad we went. For anyone interested in visiting Frankfurt, I would recommend either a well-planned day trip that connects its various sights or staying in the city and using it as a base to explore the nearby towns and villages along the Rhine.

[jbpiggin]

Via Appia Found on Satellite Image

The Appian Way is perhaps the world's most celebrated road. On the outskirts of Rome it is a major tourist attraction. I have just discovered you can see some of its far reaches on photographs from space. The Way seems to be the source of a common misconception in the English-speaking world that all Roman roads were solidly paved and ran straight as a laser, up hill and down dale, never yielding to the lie of the land. Beyond the vicinity of Rome, much of the Via Appia was neither paved nor straight, but wriggled along long-worn prehistoric ridgeway routes, where the ground was drier (and harder) and the traveler had the best chance of spotting approaching attackers, whether they were bandits or bears. Begun under the direction of Appius Claudius, a consul, in 312 BCE, the Via Appia initially connected Rome to Capua near Naples. Later it was extended to Brindisi on the Adriatic Coast. It was any physical traces of this latter extension that I was hoping to find while on a visit last week to Italy. We were staying in the newly elegant city of Matera which is dolling itself up to be one of two European Capitals of Culture of 2019. In Roman times, Matera was just a remote warren of hand-hewn caves, never mentioned in the ancient sources. Perhaps it was a refuge of the above-mentioned bandits, who could murder a merchant on the Via Appia at dusk and carry the booty 15 kilometers away to the caves to hide it, safely holed up by midnight like the Ahlbergs' brigands:

Near Matera one finds two modern highways named Via Appia. The one beginning from Ferandina, national highway SS7, and proceeding via Matera to Massafra is a fake, although it too terminates at Brindisi. The other, Puglia provincial road SP28, marked "Strada Provinciale Appia" on maps, is, in some stretches at least, the real thing. Recent articles by Luciano Piepoli dispense with the armchair scholarship (mainly German) about this part of the Via. They assemble new hard archaeological evidence about its course and stage-stops. Unfortunately Piepoli does not provide GIS geolocations (this ought to be prescribed by the style guides of every journal dealing with historical geography). He writes:

The Appian Way, at the exit from the current town of Gravina in Puglia, begins its path in a south-easterly direction near Scomunicata and, after having touched the localities of Graviscella and Ponte Padule Cardena, reaches the rocky outcrop of the Murgia Catena, located about 7 km southeast of Altamura. The road runs along the southern slope of this last location to Iesce, where there are the remains of an important settlement that had been abandoned by the 2nd century B.C. On the territory of Altamura, in a flat section between the southern slope of the Murgia Catena and the hillock of Montepovero, the projecting traces of wheel ruts are visible in the rocky surface for a length of about 200m and a total width of more than 30m, forming multiple lanes. Although they are not contemporary with one another, it appears highly probable by virtue of their topographical location that some of them must derive from the consular Via Appia. (My English, helped by Apple and Google Translate).

Hoping to see these traces of the wheels of ancient or medieval carts, we stopped our car on the shoulder of the SP28 at what we thought was the spot. Since a narrow lane of wheat was growing there on the verge of the road itself, we searched the rocky field behind it, but to no avail. On the point of giving up, and after nearly stepping on a sturdy snake, I finally discovered the ruts further up the road.

In the 50-second video above you can hear cicadas and see the colorful wild flowers of a southern Italian spring including tall fennel, all growing in the dirt that has collected in the ruts. The most pronounced track is at the left, close to the dry-stone wall. There are no doubt specialists who could estimate from the wheelbase whether this track is ancient or medieval. A second, shorter bunch of tracks can be found about 50m further down the hill (in a 24-second video). I have uploaded videos of both to my YouTube Channel. The greatest surprise came later: these ruts are visible on common garden satellite imagery. When I studied the same location on Google Maps later, I was amazed to see the big set of ruts quite clearly at the location 40.76424, 16.61516 (tip: copy just this to any sat-nav or mapping app to find it):

As far as I know, this remarkable, aerially visible archaeological site is not listed on any of the ancient geographical portals such as the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire, Pelagios or Vici. I can see how to add it to Vici (and will add it later), but I must admit that I have no idea yet how to contribute it to the former two. They do not offer any "guide for dummies" instructions. These stone remains do not seem to have gained any legal protection, although the feature is surely known locally. The IGM map of 1919 (reproduced as British AMS M791 of 1939) labels a nearby stretch of the road "od via antica Via Appia". I don't know what "od" means.

Piepoli relies on a survey of the area by the great aerial archaeologist of the 1920s to the 1950s, Giuseppe Lugli, so I presume these remains are mentioned in Lugli's books or articles. As far as I can tell, they are the only surface evidence left of the ancient Via Appia between Gravina and Tarento. The fact that wheels ran across bedrock here is an indication that the highway was unpaved. A few kilometers away, the route has been archaeologically excavated. Piepoli writes:

Near Masseria Capitolicchio Vecchia, recent excavations conducted by the Archaeological Superintendency of Puglia have highlighted a short stretch (about 200 x 4.90 m) of a road - of the glareata type - interpreted, on the basis of the construction technique, orientation and topographic context, as a segment of the Appian Way [Mattioli, 2002]. An interesting fact which emerged during the excavations is that the roadway is partially obliterated by a layer of relative collapse likely due to a structure located near the road axis. The ceramic finds and coins found can be dated between the end of the 2nd century BC and the 3rd century AD, which could be considered as a terminus post quem for the abandonment of the Via Appia in this section.

The simple glareata road had a base of stones, built up to a sand or gravel, and would be kicked or ground apart by heavy traffic if it were not maintained. This is probably what happened at 40.76424, 16.61516, exposing the bedrock to the cart and carriage wheels. Above, I mentioned a narrow crop of wheat growing in the queen's acre (the roadside). It too is clearly visible in the space imagery, and occupies what seems to have once been a ford through a seasonal stream, the Vulle. No doubt the silt, organic particles and the churning of the wheels created fertile soil in this rocky landscape. Most of the Via Appia in this area follows the watershed. Here's a more open location, looking towards the Murgia Catena from the north-west, where you may be able to see that the land slopes very lightly away to both sides.

To the left of this spot, the drop to the base of the valley is quite substantial, as the next image shows:

In an article this year, the scholar Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen compares the posterity of this southern Via Appia built in the 3rd century BCE to the highly engineered Via Traiana built with cuttings and bridges in the 2nd century CE. The bridges ultimately fell down, whereas the prehistoric footpaths and droving tracks along the watersheds remained in use. The self-maintaining character of ridgeway routes is the reason that the Via Appia lost all its gravel but remained in continuous medieval use:

For the Roman traveler, the Via Traiana was a significant improvement. It was shorter, had far fewer inclines and declines and was less vulnerable to snowfall. But despite the many advantages of the Via Traiana, it is the Via Appia which has survived to this day. An estimated 90% of the total length of the Appia is still in use as graveled or asphalt road. Large portions of the Via Traiana, on the other hand, are overgrown and impassable. (My assisted translation from the Danish.) 

Bekker-Nielsen, Tønnes. ‘Romerske Veje i Syditalien: Via Appia Og via Traiana’. Vejhistorie, 2018. Academia.edu

Piepoli, Luciano. ‘Blera e Sub Lupatia (It. Ant. 121,4-5): Proposte per l'identificazione di due stazioni itinerarie lungo il tratto apulo della via Appia’. In Statio amoena: Sostare e vivere lungo le strade romane, edited by Patrizia Basso and Enrico Zanini. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2016.  Academia.edu

———. ‘Il percorso della via Appia antica nell'Apulia et Calabria: Stato dell'arte e nuove acquisizioni sul tratto Gravina-Taranto’, in Vetera Christianorum, 51, 2014, 239-261’. Academia.edu.

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