Europe Culture

Europe’s cultural density is the reason most people visit, and the useful thing to understand is that it comes in layers rather than as a single tradition.

The classical inheritance

Greek philosophy, drama and sculpture, and the Roman state that spread them — along with law, roads, concrete and Latin — from Scotland to the Euphrates. Roman remains survive across the whole southern half of the continent, and the alphabet you are reading came by that route.

Christianity and the medieval centuries

The church commissioned most European art for a thousand years and built the buildings that still dominate the skylines: Romanesque with thick walls and round arches, then Gothic from the twelfth century, using the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress to reach heights and window areas that had been impossible. The eastern half developed Orthodox traditions of icon and dome instead, and Iberia and the Balkans carry substantial Islamic architecture.

Renaissance to modern

The rediscovery of classical models in fifteenth-century Italy, the Reformation, the baroque, the Enlightenment, and then the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ successive breaks — impressionism, modernism, the avant-gardes — each of which has its own museums and its own cities.

Music and letters

The Western classical tradition was largely written here, and the concert halls and opera houses that perform it are often the buildings it was written for. Every language has its own literature, and translation is a European habit.

Food as regional identity

Cuisine in Europe is regional rather than national, protected by designation schemes, and argued about constantly.