THE VENICE OF BELGIUM : Beguiled by Brugge, a Flemish village of romantic history

They have mussels and beer. They have old brickwork. They have scenic bridge-spans, and battered bicycles to cross them on. But best of all, the people of Brugge have proof underfoot and overhead that there is life after municipal death.

That life, prosperous, pedestrian and poly-lingual, is what enveloped me here for a handful of days this summer.

In the morning you walk the narrow streets, or pedal one of those bicycles, or glide on the long, glassy face of a canal. In the afternoon, I’m not sure what you do; it sneaks away while you’re puzzling over the Peruvian folk songs heard in the marketplace that morning. In the evening you eat well. And each night you probably sleep somewhere old and snug, in my case the well-kept rooms of a 17th-Century gentleman’s home.

It’s not cheap and it’s not a closely guarded secret, but Brugge is easy. (Pronounce it like rouge with a B in front; the French spelling is Bruges .) It’s also centrally located, 60 miles west of Brussels, 175 miles north of Paris. For those who seek a European city rich of sight, sound and taste, yet condensed into a medieval village no broader than the distance of a brisk walk, the search may end here under the towering city belfry, seven centuries old and 366 steps up. The wise traveler will take those steep, winding stairs slowly, and everything else, too.

It was 100 years ago this summer that Brugge was most recently pronounced dead.

In June, 1892, Belgian author Georges Rodenbach published “Bruges-Le-Morte,” a romance novel set in a once-proud city reduced to crumbling and quiet. Brugge, the dead city.

Rodenbach wrote the volume in French, and English translations are not easily found, but I gather from leafing through a 1990 comic book based on the story that it involved a lot of sex, scenery and men behaving poorly. On the book covers of early editions, a fragile young woman rests on her deathbed, a picturesque canal and bridge lying beyond her window.

The book sold big, as melodramas did and do. Yet at least as far as the city was concerned, the author was working not far from reality.

Brugge is more than a millennium old. By the 13th Century, when many of the town’s principal landmarks were built, the city had grown from a Flemish outpost against Norman invaders into one of the most powerful cities in Europe. Elaborate guild houses, shrines to commerce, rose above its canals.

As a member of the Hanseatic League of trading ports, the city capitalized on its position near the Reie River’s confluence with the Atlantic. Brugge dominated world markets in English wool, and even withstood an attack by the French in 1302.

But where the French failed, mud succeeded.

Slowly and steadily, silt choked the Zwijn estuary, which connected Brugge to the North Sea. The merchants moved a few miles away, but the silt caught them there as well. The merchants deserted and Brugge’s life as a working port was finished before the 15th Century was. By the 16th Century, Brugge was a backwater where priests and nuns took refuge from religious wars and philanthropists put up almshouses for the residual poor.

The advantage of all these travails is that no one ever thought to improve on the old architecture by knocking it down. There it stood, three centuries later, for Rodenbach to exploit in his romance. And there it stands now, towering over upscale boutiques and sidewalk cafes.

There are at least two versions of the city’s rebirth.

The romantic view, whose subscribers include travel guidebook maven Arthur Frommer, holds that Rodenbach’s book loosed a torrent of new tourism upon Brugge.. There is some evidence for this: The Brugge public library’s current centenary “Bruges-Le-Morte” exhibit includes a 1901 romance novel written by another author and titled “Bruges-La-Vivante.”

The unromantic view suggests that Brugge’s comeback owes more to a turn-of-the-century construction project that cut a new canal to the North Sea and opened a port at nearby Zeebrugge, thereby prompting gradual growth of trade, industry and tourism. The Encyclopaedia Britannica endorses this view.

The encyclopedists are hard to refute, but Brugge is probably enjoyed most by those who side with Frommer: the honeymooners, the anniversary-observers and the all-around romantics.

Arriving in summer, they will find thousands like themselves, treading the cobblestones in twosomes and eyeing the windows of shops such as Callebert, an international design store with such wares as a black bicycle that folds in half (about $520).

Others devote their days to the more than 100 restaurants of Brugge, which stand pinched between shops or perched above canals. e

As in Venice, to which Brugge is often compared, the summer visitors sometimes seem to outnumber the city’s 120,000 residents. Arrive later in the year and you’re likely to find more elbow room.

Arrive anytime, and you may be confounded at first by Belgian culture. As a nation, Belgium is younger than the United States, but Flanders and Wallonia, its two main regions, carry strong separate identities. In Wallonia, the language is French. In Flanders, where Brugge lies, the language is Flemish, which is closer to Dutch than it is to French.

I stayed at the Oud Huis Amsterdam, a 17-room establishment that fronted on a canal and sat about six blocks from the main square. The cheapest single room began at $125 nightly--reasonable, compared to going European rates--and the service was beyond reasonable.

One morning, I mentioned at the desk that I planned to rent a bicycle. Not knowing me from Adam, hotelier Philip Traen immediately stepped up to offer use of his well-used green Raleigh, complete with mudguard behind its front tire and warning bell at my left thumb. Thus equipped, I rambled out to the windmills at the edge of town and back, sneering as I went at the other tourists on their obvious rentals.

Probably, one of those tourists stood above and sneered down at me when I settled in to take a canal tour. This was a matter of 30 travelers (infants and poodles excluded) wedged into a long, narrow boat, and assessed $4 each. It lasted about 45 minutes, and was strictly a tourist experience. But even with no legroom, the swan’s-eye view from under a low stone bridge is hard to complain about.

“For me, the best time to visit Brugge is October,” local resident Martin Vansteenkiste told me one day. “The crowds are not here, nor is winter. The medieval spirit comes better out in autumn, which is a very melancholic period. The autumn leaves are on the ground, all brown and yellow. That’s the most romantic period.”

Vansteenkiste had the longish hair, noble bearing and elocution of 18th-Century gentry, but at age 32, he was in his second year at the reins of a horse-drawn carriage. For about $24--no great bargain for a tour of less than an hour--he and a mare named Darko led me on a trot around the city.

At the city’s hub, the Grote Markt or market square, walkers far outnumber drivers, 11 restaurants stand in a colorful row facing the much-loved belfry, and a pair of statuary lions gaze down from the steps of the 14th-Century Town Hall.

A block east, past a row of lace shops, stands the Basilica of the Holy Blood, a 12th-Century structure that for seven centuries or more has held a scrap of cloth said to be soaked with the blood of Christ. On Fridays, the relic is displayed for the public.

On the opposite side of the square stand a gaggle of young people’s brasseries , with names like Cool Cat and Ambiotix.

One night as I sat there after dinner, an uninvited but savvy band of four musicians stepped up to face the sidewalk-table drinkers. Quickly, they produced a startling array of instruments--electric guitar, accordion, snare drum and a silvery tuba--and charged expertly through half a dozen lighthearted American blues tunes. Then they collected a hatful of tips, sheathed their instruments and sat down among the audience to drink up some of their income.

When a pair of Americans with an acoustic guitar stood next to sing some rock music, a pair of policemen immediately stepped up and ordered silence. No music playing outdoors, the officers explained, as the first group, their encased guitar, accordion, tuba and drum lying at their feet, sipped their drinks, smiled and said nothing. A tricky business, playing on the streets of Brugge.

Steenstraat, the city’s prime shopping avenue, runs southwest from the main square, changes its name to Zuidzandstraat, then terminates at ‘t Zandt, a collection of modern sculpture and fountains that tops the city’s underground parking lot. Along the way, the new merchants of Brugge offer jewelry, ice cream, clothes, waffles, books, French fries, beauty products, more clothes, more jewelry, cruelty-free beauty products, mussels, chocolate and so on. Rumbling down that street behind a horse was a comprehensive sensory experience--brightly clad mannequins, odors of chocolate and seafood, the sound of city banners snapping in the wind overhead.

For years, Vansteenkiste told me, there had been 12 commercial horse-drawn carriages in town, a figure set by city officials.

“And then last year, there was a 13th,” he continued. “There was a lot of misunderstanding about that. There was panic. People said, ‘I was waiting years to start my own business with the 13th carriage!’ When the town is small, these problems are big.”

Every few blocks, between sights, stores and eateries, each street seems to cross a canal, the waters cleft by swans and tour boats. The most photographed of these scenes is the Rozenhoedkaai, a cityscape about three blocks from the market square where Brugge’s most appealing visual elements converge: water, boats, flowers, ancient walls, red-tile roofs, creeping greenery. When Vansteenkiste, Darko and I clopped past, our carriage completed the picture.

I seem to have saved the museums for the last.

That would be an anticlimax in some cities, but not Brugge. About four blocks south of the main square, near Mariastraat and Gruuthusestraat, four substantial museums huddle. Here the wise traveler buys a combined ticket for $8, saves $4 off the individual admission prices.

The Old St. John’s Hospital and Memling Museum, a joint operation, houses exhibits of old medical instruments to a half-dozen paintings by Belgian master Hans Memling. The Brangwyn Museum offers examples of the city’s storied lacework downstairs, graphic and fine arts of former Brugge resident Frank Brangwyn upstairs.

My two favorites, however, are the Groeninge and Gruuthuse museums.

The Groeninge surveys Belgian and Dutch paintings, including the spectacularly detailed 15th-Century work of Jan van Eyck, the accomplished perversity of Hieronymus Bosch, and various canvasses illustrating beheadings, skeletons and skinnings-alive. Amid respectful silence, the place offers up more violence than a Schwarzenegger film festival. Then, as the galleries move into the 19th and 20th centuries, the scenes dissolve into a calming succession of bistro-loungers and still lifes.

In the Gruuthuse, a converted 15th-Century palace, curators have arrayed several centuries’ worth of kitchen tools, household accessories, outmoded weapons and, in one dark corner, a 15-foot-high guillotine from 1796. From an upstairs Gruuthuse balcony, I stood and watched Brugge drink in a summer drizzle--scampering hooded pedestrians, glistening trees and shrubs, deepening earthen colors in the old walls and tile roofs.

Just as it does for Vansteenkiste the carriage driver each October, the place seemed to go medieval before my eyes. The folding bicycles and floating tour boats receded. Brugge died and was born again, silt-free, shipping-rich. Finally, an exasperated museum guard came and ordered me in from the rain so he could lock up.