Bruges City Hall

This guide to Bruges City Hall's Gothic Hall traces two timelines painted onto the same room: the medieval one, when aldermen ruled a city hosting merchants from some two hundred Hanseatic cities, and the one four centuries later, when the painter Albrecht De Vriendt covered these walls with murals of that vanished age. It follows what ended the golden era, from the death of Mary of Burgundy in 1482 to a channel silting shut beneath passing ships, and how the city's poverty afterward left its medieval buildings standing. Look up at the murals and ask which century you are actually looking at.