Charm, change in a culture capital

One of the things I like about Europe is that everything is close to everything else. For instance, it takes only 90 minutes by train to travel from Paris to Brussels, where my sister Martha lives. So I went there over Easter weekend.

But Martha and I are a footloose people, so we couldn’t leave it at that. We decided to have my brother-in-law Scott drive us to Lille, southwest of Brussels, chiefly to see a big exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts devoted to painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).

The Rubens show, which lasts until June 14, was mounted to celebrate Lille’s ascendancy to European culture capital for 2004, an honor this city in the north of France shares with Genoa, Italy.

In Lille’s case, the designation also reflects the city’s efforts to rehabilitate itself after decades of decline. Its work is mostly apparent in Old Lille, a labyrinth of narrow lanes bordered by marvelously decorated Flemish Baroque buildings in the heart of town.

The sun was shining when we set out, a rare event in this habitually gray, weather-beaten part of the world. Spring was hovering in the tulips and the almost-green treetops. Given the job of navigator, I promptly got us lost in a maze of rural roads south of Brussels. We eventually found our way to A8, which runs through southern Belgium and crosses into France, with just a little sign to note it, a few miles east of Lille.

Along the way, Martha and I tried to get a grip on the duchy of Burgundy, a European state as great as France in the 15th century. Burgundian Duke Philip the Good, who reigned from 1419 to 1467, made Lille one of his domain’s capitals before it passed by marriage, machinations and war to the Hapsburg Empire, Spain and then France under Louis XIV.

We had both been reading a series of historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett (starting with “Niccolo Rising”) about this period of wealth, power and achievement in Northern Europe and were keen to see what remained of it in Lille.

Scott planned to drive back to Brussels that day, but I had booked a room for Martha and me at the modest Hotel Brueghel, a few blocks from the art museum, train station and Old Lille.

Lille had largely emptied out for the Easter holiday, as we discovered on the short walk to the Palais des Beaux-Arts. All the shops and most restaurants were shut tight, which is something you get used to in Europe.

We had a bite to eat in the museum’s restaurant, which gave us a chance to appreciate the modern annex, separated by a wide, shallow reflecting pool from the grand belle epoque edifice that houses the second-biggest collection of art in France, after the Louvre in Paris. Then we took in the Rubens exhibit, with 163 works by the painter, a German native who lived mostly in Antwerp, Belgium.

I was floored by three huge, never-before-seen-together Rubens depositions from the cross, full of blood and gore. Martha got the feeling that the painter was something of an early European Renaissance comer, interested in money and recognition.

By the end of the show, we’d all had enough of the painter’s breast fixation. If there was a woman in the picture, she had her top off, with breasts too rosy to be true to nature.

After Rubens, we walked through Old Lille, with its flamboyant Gothic Palais Rihour, started in 1453 by Philip the Good and completed by his son Charles the Bold. (It is now the town’s tourist information office.) Nearby, we found the Place du General De Gaulle, commemorating the leader who was born in Lille in 1890; the gorgeously decorated 17th century Bourse, made up of 24 little shops surrounding a courtyard; and the Lille opera house.

Scott drove back to Brussels after that, leaving Martha and me to nap in a spartan but perfectly clean and habitable hotel room. Our window looked out at a sculpted knight, with codpiece, poised on one of the nearby church’s towers; she thought he was peeping at us, so we closed the curtains. When we woke up, around 6:30 p.m., we decided to see more of Lille.

That meant walking a few blocks to the new section of the city, between its two main train stations, Lille-Europe and Lille-Flanders. These are connected by a smashing viaduct designed by Le Corbusier and the exuberantly decorated Lille Metro, the automated subway system. Nearby are futuristic buildings, such as the pinball machine-shaped Credit Lyonnais Tower. To understand Europe in the 21st century, these seemed as important to see as the tangled Old Lille of Philip the Good.

That night, Martha and I had dinner at the Brasserie de la Paix near the Palais Rihour. We ordered a heaping platter of shellfish, including crab, snails and oysters, which is sensible to eat in this city close to the English Channel and North Sea. Then we went back to the hotel and retired, talking about the duchy of Burgundy and other things, until our eyes closed.

The next morning, it was a short walk to the station, where Martha caught a train that took her to Brussels in 40 minutes. It took me an hour to get to Paris on the TGV, one of France’s high-speed train lines.

Europe is like that: densely packed and full of intriguing things to see.

For more information, see www.lilletourism.com.

Susan Spano’s “Postcards From Paris” are posted at www. latimes.com/susanspano. She welcomes comments at postcards@latimes.com but regrets that she cannot respond to them individually.