Before leaving for a several-hour drive to Nuremberg, we spent a crisp, clear morning walking around Zwinger Palace. Zwinger was built in the 18th century, and like everything else in Dresden, thoroughly destroyed in 1945. Our walk also served to kill time before the post office opened so we could send our Christmas pyramid back to Cyprus 🙂
The palace is huge, but there was a lot of construction going on and scaffolding all over the main views. Also, one half of the large courtyard was pretty dark because the low winter sun hadn’t yet come over the east wall of the palace. Having throughly exhausted ourselves “museuming” at the Green Vault the day before, we decided to just walk around the courtyard and marvel at the masonry. It is totally over the top, in typical baroque fashion.
Here’s my model, kindly demonstrating scale for the viewers at home:
We also stumbled across this fountain (not working, on account of it being December at all) which looked like a church spire set on the ground. According the the sign, this was called “cholerabrunnen”– with a name like that, I thought there’d be an interesting story behind it but in fact it was created by an architect who was thankful Dresden had been spared by a nasty outbreak of cholera in 1842. No bigs.
