Megalomania in the Bavarian Alps Neuschwanstein castle, Herrenchimsee castle and Linderhof is a trilogy, the ‘mad’ king LudvigII wrote in stone. (I do not mean he carved the stone edicts like our Ashok, but he built these three stone monuments to his own ego in the Bavarian Alpine region.) We spent a day in summer of 2005 touring Ludvig’s castles. It is well nigh impossible to write about Neuschwanstein, Linderhof and Herrenchimsee without mentioning king LudvigII . He was a poet and a dreamer and his Linderhof (supposedly a ‘hunting lodge’) is an architectural poem, while his dreams have taken a concrete shape in Neuschwanstein. Like all dreamers, he was highly impractical and emptied the treasury to realize his dreams. Throughout our tour of his castles, a half-forgotten nursery rhyme kept running in the background of
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