"If I love the Ludwig Strasse as the most beautiful portion of the new Munich, I almost equally love the Schrannien Platz as about the quaintest part of old Munich. It is long and narrow as a market-place, but wide as a street. The houses are old; many of them very handsome, and rich with ornamental stucco-work,--
'All garlanded with carven imageries Of fruit and flowers and bunches of knot-grass.'
The roofs are steep, red tiled, and perforated with rows of little pent-house windows. The fronts of the houses are of all imaginable pale tints,--stone colors, pinks, greens, greys, and tawnies. Three of the four corners of the market-place are adorned with tall pepper-box towers, with domed roofs and innumerable narrow windows. At one end is the fountain; and in the centre a heavy, but quaint shrine,--a column supporting a gilt figure of the Madonna. The eye wanders down various picturesque streets which open into the market-place; and on one hand, above steep roofs, gaze down the two striking red-brick towers of the _Frauen Kirche_--the cathedral of Munich:--those two red towers which are seen in all views of this city, and which belong as much to Munich as the dome of St. Paul's does to the city of London,--those towers which in the haze of sunset are frequently transformed into violet-tinted columns, or about which in autumn and winter mists cling with a strange dreariness as if they were desolate mountain peaks!
"But the quaintest feature of all in the Schrannien Platz is a sort of arcade which runs around it. Here, beneath the low and massy arches, are crowded thick upon each other a host of small shops. What queer, dark little cells they are,--yet how picturesque! Here is a dealer in crucifixes,--next to him a woollen-draper, displaying bright striped woollen goods for the peasants,--then a general dealer, with heaps and bundles and tubs and chests containing every thing most heterogeneous,--and next to him a dealer in pipes. There are bustle and gloom always beneath these heavy low arches,--but they present a glorious bit of picturesque life. There are queer wooden booths, too, along one portion of the Schrannien Platz where it rather narrows, losing its character of market-place, and descending to that of an ordinary street. But the booths do not degenerate in their picturesque character. The earthenware booths--of which there are several--are truly delicious. Such rows and piles of dark green, orange, ruddy chocolate-brown, sea-green, pale yellow, and deep blue and grey vessels of all forms and sizes--all quaint, all odd--jugs, flagons, pipkins, queer pots with huge lids, queer tripods for which I know no name--things which always seem to me to come out of a witch's kitchen, but by means of which I suspect that my own dinner is cooked every day. All these heaps of crockery lie about the doors, and load the windows of the wooden booths, and line shelves and shelves within the gloom of the little shops themselves. When I first came here these old crockery shops were a more frequent study to me than any thing else in the old town.