TRATTORIA DEL GACCO
Everybody who knows and loves the Swabian poet Mörike, the music for whose songs, composed by Hugo Wolff, have become the property of the international brotherhood of music-lovers, will think of his “Old Church-Tower Cock,” strangely similar in feeling to Tennyson’s poem of “The Cock” and his brothers of the weather.
We are not surprised to find that the poets of the land of Wanderlust give special attention to taverns and signs. Besides Mörike, and Uhland, whose “Inn” we quoted above, Johann Peter Hebel, a son of the Black Forest, has always shown a special predilection for the sign and its wonders. In an untranslatable poem, “On the death of a tippler,” he celebrates his man as a diligent astronomer who never tires looking for shining “Stars,” a brave knight always ready to hunt up “Bears” and “Lions,” a pious Christian willing to do penitence at the “Cross,” a man who frequented the best society, including “The Three Kings,” his most intimate friends.
Germany may boast, too, of a classical literary tavern, the “Bratwurstglöckle” in Nuremberg, built directly against the walls of a church, the Gothic Moritz-Kapelle. Among its famous guests were the Mastersinger, Hans Sachs, and Dürer, Germany’s greatest artist. Like a house out of a fairy tale it stands before us; we are only surprised that no fence of sausages surrounds it and that its door and window shutters are ordinary wood and not gingerbread!
The King of Württemberg
Stuttgart