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From the north end of Galerie du Roi, it's a brief walk to place de la Monnaie , the drab and dreary modern square that's overshadowed by the huge centre Monnaie , which houses offices, shops and the main post office. The only building of interest here is the Theatre de la Monnaie , Brussels' opera house, a Neoclassical structure built in 1819 and with an interior added in 1856 to a design by Poelaert, the architect of the Palais de Justice. The theatre's real claim to fame, however, is as the starting-point of the revolution against the Dutch in 1830: a nationalistic libretto in Auber's The Mute Girl of Portici sent the audience wild, and they poured out into the streets to raise the flag of Brabant, signalling the start of the rebellion. The opera told the tale of an Italian uprising against the Spanish, and with such lines as "To my country I owe my life, To me it will owe its liberty" one of the Dutch censors - of whom there were many - should really have seen what was coming, as a furious King William I pointed out. On the far side of the centre Monnaie is traffic-choked boulevard Anspach which forks and widens at place de Brouckere , a busy junction that accommodates the Hotel Metropole , whose splendidly ornate public areas date from 1895 and were once the haunt of the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan.
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