Last weekend my son and me visited the world´s largest model railway, "Miniatur Wunderland", here in Hamburg. Apart from featuring 1.300 digitally controlled trains, 100.000 vehicles (many of them moving autonomously), 130.000 trees, and 400.000 human figurines in HO (1:87 scale), it is home of a working replica of Hamburg´s Airport, a harbor with floating ships in the Scandinavian section, and a miniature chocolate factory. The attraction is ever expanding and new sections are added on a regular basis. Even though not strictly related to coins, I thought you may enjoy some of the ancient sites in the new Italian section: Next to the Flavian Amphitheatre you can also visit the Forum Romanum: Next to Mount Vesuvius, you can see the ruins of Pompeji: A day at Miniatur Wunderland lasts only eight minutes and is followed by five minutes of nighttime. Pompeji is peaceful... but doomed
That is some remarkable modeling. One would almost mistake those for photographs of the real thing. Almost. I'll bet that was a lot of fun.
Totally! We booked a behind-the-scenes-tour and got to climb inside the working volcano https://www.youtube.com/watch?annot...&feature=iv&src_vid=KRy0Wp4G4Ic&v=4RKdBPvlIMc
Wow, that was cool! But of course a miniature chocolate factory, that is just torture. Gimme the real thing, including lots of samples. Incidentally, I just returned from a weekend trip to Rome. Saw the Colosseum too (the big one, hehe) and the fabulous coin collection at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme: http://archeoroma.beniculturali.it/musei/museo-nazionale-romano/palazzo-massimo/medagliere (in Italian; the "English" button works for the menu items etc. but not for the actual text). Thousands of ancient, medieval and modern coins, mostly collected by Francesco Gnecchi and king Vittorio Emanuele III, are on display there. They even show tools of ancient counterfeiters. What was also interesting was a visit to the Mint (IPZS) Museum. We were a group of collectors and had made an appointment before; you cannot simply walk in. The museum not only has Italian (mostly kingdom and republic) coinage but also many machines and instruments that were used for coin production, from pantographs to presses. Even better, we had two guides, and one of them turned out to be Valerio de Seta, one of the mint's designers and engravers. Oh, and the weather was definitely better than here in Germany ... Christian
I envy you globetrotting world traveler types. I live in a nice tourist destination, but seldom leave it.
that is so awesome to look at. model building at its finest. I wonder how long that took to build ? 1,000 of hours ?
