Brazzaville
— — two capitals across one river.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of the Republic of the Congo, on the right bank of the river of the same name. Kinshasa stands directly across the water — the only two capitals in the world that look at each other this closely. Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza founded the town in 1880, and the Basilique Sainte-Anne, with its green-tiled roof, still marks the skyline above the Poto-Poto quarter.
Brazzaville, 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.
Brazzaville sits on the north bank of the Congo River, directly across from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — the closest pair of national capitals in the world apart from Rome and the Vatican. The Italian-born French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza founded the post in 1880, and the city took his name. It served as the capital of French Equatorial Africa, and during the Second World War as the capital of Free France after de Gaulle's 1940 broadcast. The modern city holds roughly 2.4 million people, about a third of the country's population.
The Congo River at Brazzaville is the second longest in Africa after the Nile and the largest by discharge of any river in the world after the Amazon. Just downstream of the city the river drops through the Livingstone Falls, a series of thirty-two cataracts impassable to shipping, which is why the colonial railway was cut from Pointe-Noire on the coast to bypass them. The Pool Malebo, the broad lake-like stretch in front of the city, holds Mbamou Island, an inhabited sand island that belongs to Congo-Brazzaville despite sitting mid-river.
The Basilique Sainte-Anne, designed by Roger Erell and consecrated in 1949, is the city's defining building — a long parabolic nave roofed in green Bavarian tile, a Sahelian silhouette in concrete. The Poto-Poto School of Painting, founded by the French painter Pierre Lods in 1951, gave Central African modernism a centre of gravity; its alumni include Marcel Gotene and Eugène Malonga. The Mausoleum of Brazza, opened in 2006, holds the founder's remains in Italian marble on the riverside corniche. The old Case de Gaulle, now the French ambassador's residence, dates to the Free French period.