Leuven

Leuven (Louvain), like Oxford or Cambridge, is a place where underneath the hubbub of daily life you sense an age-old devotion to learning and scholarship. Its ancient Roman Catholic university, founded in 1425, was one of Europe's great seats of learning during the late Middle Ages. The city was pillaged and burned by the Germans in 1914; 1,800 buildings, including the university library, were destroyed. They were rebuilt with gifts from American universities only to be bombed again in 1944. In the 1960s, intercultural tensions caused the old bilingual university to split into separate French-language and Flemish-language schools. French speakers moved their university south of the linguistic border to the new town of Louvain-la-Neuve; the Flemish speakers remained in Leuven.