Parc de Pourtalès

This guide to Parc de Pourtales in Strasbourg starts with a puzzle: seven bronze ears cast into the tree bark just off the path, sculptor Claudio Parmiggiani's 1990 installation that once numbered fifteen. From there it follows the land's owners, from Baron Paul-Athanase Renouard de Bussiere's early nineteenth-century chateau to his heiress Melanie's marriage into the Pourtales banking dynasty. You'll hear about her father-in-law James-Alexandre de Pourtales's art collection, sold at a Paris auction in 1855 that pushed a Rothschild to drop out of the bidding for a Frans Hals portrait. The guide traces how that fortune later filled these grounds with emperors and composers.