Foreign bodies uncovered

On Saturday 2 July, RSC Belgium members and friends were treated to a fascinating guided walk around the lower town in Brussels led by Dr Paul Snell. Paul specialises in art and architectural tours usually with a particular theme or geographical focus and for our walk he took us on a tour of ‘Foreign Bodies’.

The walk started with a coffee at Le Cirio café in central Brussels. We learnt that this grand and venerable Brussels establishment was originally set up as a canned vegetable store in the 1880s by Italian Francesco Cirio as part of a chain of stores across Europe. You can still spot Cirio tomatoes on the shelves of your local store. The cafe has also been a regular backdrop for films.

The tour then moved on to the Metropole hotel to learn about the Solvay Conferences via the Rodin reliefs on the Bourse and eventually ended at Mont des Arts. Here many of the party enjoyed an optional lunch on the terrace of the Restaurant Albert on the fifth floor of the Belgian Royal Library (KBR).  

Our thanks to Paul for a truly informative and entertaining walk packed with facts and anecdotes: it would be true to say 'we all learned something - in fact several new things' during the excursion! 

My personal favourite was that Jean Neuhaus, inventor (or was it his wife?) of the praline and ballotin box, was another Italian visitor to Belgium (original family name Casanova!) and was a pharmacist. His first pharmacy shop was in Galeries St. Hubert and he started coating his medical pills with chocolate to make them more palatable.

Paul's Foreign Bodies walks explore places associated with various guests, visitors, exiles, invaders and liberators in the capital. Our tour also included historical characters like Jacques-Louis David, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Verlaine, and Baudelaire (not a big fan of Brussels).