From the Thorvaldsen museum we walked across a courtyard to enter Christiansborg Palace, one-time residence of the Danish kings, and from 1794 the seat of Parliament.
Your basic Stately Home.
We've been in a number of palaces from similar eras, in England, France, Germany. Still they are never quite the "been there, done that" experience you might expect.
Given enough money, marble, and good taste you can usually get something nice.
The main attraction here was the series of royal apartments. They were like apartments we've seen in other European capitals, but had nice touches.
Off that room was a display of a royal set of porcelain dishes in which each piece was individually decorated with plants from the Flora Danica. (According to that link there were originally 1800 pieces in the set, and 1500 pieces survive.)
Click through for porcelain-y goodness. Sorry about the white balance; they were under multi-colored lights.
The library had been funded by a tax on the population of the island of Funen. As part of the deal, only artisans of Funen were employed in decorating it. There must have been pretty good plaster workers on Funen.
Note the swans.
In this room was a set of chairs, each decorated with a different bird.
The dining room is 10 by 40 meters (about 2/3 of our house lot in Palo Alto).
Said to seat 400. Probably have to bring in some card tables and folding chairs to hit that.
The final room is decorated with eleven Gobelin tapestries made in 1990, depicting the history of pretty much everything.
Note factories in upper center, famous faces across the top.
Somewhat museum-ed out, we headed for lunch. To be continued in part C.
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