FT.com / Travel - The fairytale beauty of Bruges

FT.com / Travel - The fairytale beauty of Bruges: "Deprived of its principal livelihood and bypassed by the industrial revolution, Bruges fell into a sort of Sleeping Beauty repose, its fairytale loveliness untrammelled by progress. By the time the 19th-century writer Georges Rodenbach published his popular if morbid fin-de-siècle novel Bruges-la-morte (in turn the inspiration for Erich Korngold’s no less mad-with-misery Die tote Stadt), the fortunes of this celebratedly “dead” city had begun to revive thanks to its reinvention as a kind of early northern Renaissance theme park drawing visitors from across Europe, the British in particular."