L.A., churches and gardens — it all works into the look of ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘The Hague’, its architecture, its streets and its houses. A big house, as in ‘Amsterdam’, is a big house. In this case it is a long narrow block with rows of narrow windows running around a courtyard. The block is very much larger than the average single-family house. The house here is one of the largest houses in the Netherlands.
There are some great houses in this area, too, but all the rest are two- or three-story brick and stone ones. They are very tall, with a second story. Some of the other houses have a very low, narrow second floor. The courtyard is usually deep and long, with a low wall on the street side and a high wall on the inner side. The courtyard is planted with flowers, usually roses. Flowers are not the only things that grow in a Netherlands courtyard. Here again the style is one of the most elegant in the world, the Dutch.
## L’Osservatore Romano
It was a small square before the Reformation – a square with an ancient fountain. That fountain has been moved to the back of a park, where it is surrounded by a few chairs and a few tables. The square is now called the Piazza Michelangelo because Michelangelo’s statue of David stands in a little niche in the corner of the wall. The story goes that in the time of Pope Julius I (who ruled from 757-604) the square was a marketplace for the prostitutes of the Porta Maggiore. The Piazza Michelangelo was an open space that had no fences but was quite dangerous. It was a popular spot for the people who would come to Rome to buy and sell the bodies of women who had been turned into statues. The statue that stands in the Piazza Michelangelo today, Michelangelo’s David, is actually the body of a dead prostitute.
