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he Château de Brantes is an 18th-century manor house with a contemporary garden inspired by the gardens of Tuscany, located in the town of Sorgues. The gardens are classified by the French Ministry of Culture among the Remarkable Gardens of France.
The garden, 1.1 hectares in area, is enclosed by a wall of stones. It features a Magnolia grandiflora tree that is 200 years old, one of the oldest in Europe, Lagerstroemia trees a hundred years old, and a plantation of plane trees dating to 1816. Flowers include plantings of peony, rose, agapanthia and althea.
The house was built in 1700 by Pierre del Bianco, the marquis de Brantes, the paymaster for the soldiers of the papal state of Avignon. It was enlarged in 1816 by General de Cessac, a minister of Emperor Napoleon I, and by his wife Sibylle de Brantes, who created the park. The park was restored and the contemporary garden begun in 1956 by Louis and Madelaine de Brantes, the parents of the current owner of the chateau.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.