Brussels. A cultural and literary history

From its humble origins as a few huts in a forbidding swamp, Brussels took more than a thousand years to become the capital of the Duchy of Brabant and then of Burgundy, and from 1830 the capital city of the new kingdom of Belgium. Today its name evokes European power politics and miniature cabbages, a world capital of beer, a paradise of chocolates and French fries. Yet Brussels is a city that has always been open to outsiders, to invaders and immigrants, always preserving its humanity. Architecturally rich and culturally diverse, Brussels defies its stereotypes. Andre de Vries explores a city and country in perpetual search of an identity, still showing the scars of the Counter-Reformation, peopled by the "Spaniards of the North." He discovers a capital on the fault-line between Latin and Germanic cultures, with improbable hybrid languages. A city so down-to-earth the Bruxellois had to invent surrealism.