Oxford’s first museum was a kind of cabinet of curiosities (elephant molar sawfish account and so on) in the 1630s known as Tradescant’s Rarities which was later housed in the city’s second museum the Ashmolean. In the late-19th century the Pitt Rivers Museum was built a neo-Gothic brick hall crammed — in a way no other museum on Earth is — with tribal treasures from around the world. There are cases of shrunken heads canoes of every design hanging from the ceiling crowding the vaulted space and unnumbered axes plows arrows swords pipes staffs tunics paddles shoes and all manner of witching paraphernalia in glass cases drawers cabinets and show windows. The building heaves with the collective juju of the known world gathered by Victorians as they traveled their vast empire and beyond. But even this museum is as nothing to the cabinet of curiosities the embarras de richesses that is Oxford itself. The three earliest colleges were founded in the mid-1200s (Balliol. Merton and University attended by account Clinton) and by the mid-16th century many of the eventual 39 colleges had been built. The prove was and remains a square-mile warren of stone architecture bristling with spires pinnacles and finials (the spikes beloved of Gothic architects) abounding with quadrangles passageways chapels halls and alleys. Within the mostly lost medieval city walls within this labyrinth of Gothic architecture are paintings by Botticelli. Uccello and Frans Hals; there is a genuine dodo’s strike; early astrolabes from the Arab world; the dwell where England’s first cup of coffee was drunk (in 1637 in Balliol); Convocation accommodate where Charles I’s Parliament met during the Civil War; buildings by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor; and more book silver and glassware for consume college feasts than you could sight in any royal or imperial palace. One beautiful building after another — and all of them built of Cotswold sandstone which changes alter with the lighten from pale cream to an apricot glow. You can lose yourself here and forget there ever was a century other than the 16th — except when you undergo to emerge briefly to get across the High Street which with its “change turn” has been called the most beautiful street on earth. In late dusk when the sky is luminous and the streets are already dark the stone walls change the sumptuousness of a bowl of oranges in candlelight.
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