A few months ago son had to give a report about "The Fuggers" in his history class. Besides the Fuggers being very clever, a bit ruthless and very successful merchants from Augsburg, Germany, (similar to the Medicis from Florence, Italy), I couldn't remember anything about them. Apparently I wasn't paying too much attention during my history class.
After looking through the books I had bought for son and doing some online reading, I found one thing that did fascinate me about the Fuggers: The Fuggerei in Augsburg.
Jacob Fugger, the Rich, founded the Fuggerei in 1521 as a social settlement for the poor. The annual rent was and still is 1 Gulden (ca. 0, 88 cents) and three prayers a day for the Fugger family. There are still 67 buildings that are being used. The people inhabiting the apartments nowadays live there for a few cents and daily prayers. Not much has changed there since 1521.
The Fuggerei is the oldest social settlement in the world...
...and I really wanted to see it with my own eyes.
It has a church, a little shop, eight lanes and seven gates with a wall surrounding the city within a city.
There is a gate guard, dressed in old fashioned clothes, guarding the main gate which is still being closed at 10pm every night. If you need to get in or out the Fuggerei later than that the inhabitants have to pay him a little fee.
At one point Franz Mozart, the Grand-, Grandfather of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived here.
Two apartments are open for visitors. One is furnished like the apartments people live in today, the other one looks like on the day the first inhabitants moved in...
...and yes, with that little handle you can open the outside door, scaring the wits out of somebody standing outside...
1 comment:
Sozialwohnungen mit Stil!
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