More than 10,000 people spent last Saturday night visiting a Brussels museum as part of “Museum Night Fever”. The sheer popularity, however, meant that my experience was more traipsing around town from one queue to another rather than actual museum visiting.
Still, I did make it into the Cinquantenaire museum (part of the Royal Museums of Art and History) and discovered its Roman mosaic collection from Apamea in Syria. That in itself made the evening worthwhile. The centrepiece of this wing is a beautiful 5th century floor mosaic depicting hunting scenes. Along one side of the room is an impressive reconstruction of part of Apamea’s colonnaded street, which ran almost 2 kilometres on a north-south axis through the city. The museum’s collection also included mosaics dated from the year 392 from Apamea’s synagogue.
If you were looking for dance classes rather than Roman mosaics, then the place to be was the quirky “Continental Superstar” space, which I visited earlier in the year (click here to read the post). The disco lights were spinning and the bar was open. It still didn’t quite work for me though.
In total, 14 museums opened their doors on Saturday between 7pm and 1am. The Museum of Musical Instruments’ party sounded good and was certainly popular but the organisers told us that we probably wouldn’t get to the front of the queue before it finished.
Next tip: the Robert Capa photography exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Unfortunately the museum decided there were too many visitors that evening and so they were closing the doors early. Luckily though it’s just around the corner from the Sablon area and so we rounded off the evening with a nightcap in a local bar. Not quite the museum extravaganza I had anticipated but it had its highlights all the same.
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