What a magnificent central plaza in Brussels! Our main reason for visiting Brussels was to go to the Erasmus House Museum, a home where Erasmus spent a pleasant half year and which holds many of his volumes. There is also a beautiful and refreshing Philosophical Garden and a Medicinal Garden with herbs that attend to the illnesses that Erasmus mentioned in his letters. Erasmus lived in the late medieval period and is considered one of the foremost Humanists. He is probably best known for his work, In Praise of Folly. It is interesting to note that his life span (1469-1536) exactly coincides with what I have been calling the Ptolemaic age in Europe, the time in which Ptolemaic maps completely re-orient European worldview, just prior to the publication of the work of Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), published in 1543 and printed in Nuremberg (where Behaim's globe was produced in 1493). A shaky 360 view of the plaza: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyN92sYiaxo.
