Mainz
— — red sandstone above slow water.
Not only on a wall.
“Mainz sits where the Main meets the Rhine, and the great cathedral of red Buntsandstein has stood at its centre for more than a thousand years. The old town around it is narrow and tilted, half-timbered above the cobbles, with wine taverns that close when the wine is gone. Gutenberg printed his Bible a few streets from the cathedral in the 1450s, and the museum that bears his name keeps two surviving copies. In February the city turns itself over to Fastnacht, and the trams run slowly through confetti for a week. from the studio
Mainz, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mainz is the capital of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, on the west bank of the Rhine at its confluence with the Main, opposite Wiesbaden. The population is around 220,000. The city was founded as the Roman castrum Mogontiacum in 13 or 12 BC under Drusus and served as the capital of the province of Germania Superior. From the eighth century until 1803 it was the seat of the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, primate of Germany and chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire — one of the most powerful ecclesiastical offices in Europe.
Mainz Cathedral, the Hoher Dom St. Martin, is built in the deep red Buntsandstein quarried in the nearby Pfalz and Spessart hills. The current structure was begun in 975 under Archbishop Willigis and rebuilt repeatedly after fires in 1009, 1081, and 1137. The six towers and the long Romanesque nave date in their present form mostly to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Along with Speyer and Worms, Mainz is one of the three great imperial cathedrals of the Upper Rhine. The stone reads almost black in rain and warms to rust-red in afternoon sun.
The Gutenberg-Museum on Liebfrauenplatz, opposite the cathedral, holds two of the surviving copies of the 42-line Bible Johannes Gutenberg printed in Mainz around 1454-1455, in a darkened vault on the ground floor. A working reconstruction of his press runs short demonstrations on the hour. The Roman ruins of the theatre near Mainz Römisches Theater station are free and open. For the Fastnacht street days, the Rosenmontag parade on the Monday before Ash Wednesday is the largest of the year, drawing several hundred thousand people through the old town.