Belgian Beer World Experience

This guide to the Belgian Beer World Experience in Brussels starts underground, with the graves of Franciscan friars who settled here in 1238 and the archaeological site beneath the floor where their monastery once stood. It follows what rose above those old stones instead: a grand nineteenth-century stock exchange built by architect Leon Suys, its facade decorated in part by a little-known young Parisian carver named Auguste Rodin, working anonymously years before the world knew his name. From there it traces the exchange's final trading days in 1996 and the building's long closure before its recent transformation.