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Opposite the Church of St Nicholas and newly cleaned and polished, rises the grandiose Bourse , formerly the home of the city's stock exchange, a Neoclassical structure of 1873 caked with fruit, fronds, languishing nudes and frolicking putti. This breezily self-confident structure sports a host of allegorical figures (Industry, Navigation, Asia, Africa, etc) which both reflect the preoccupations of the nineteenth-century Belgian bourgeoisie and, in their easy self-satisfaction, imply that wealth and pleasure are synonymous. The Bourse is flanked by sterling town houses, the setting for two of the city's more famous cafes, the Art Nouveau Falstaff , on the south side at rue Henri Maus 17-23, and the fin-de-siecle Le Cirio on the other side at rue de la Bourse 18. In front of Le Cirio are the glassed-in foundations of a medieval church and convent, unearthed by archeologists in the 1980s and now known rather grandly as Bruxella 1238 . There are occasional guided tours of the site, although these are only of specialist interest - the tourist office on the Grand-Place can give you times. The square in front of the Bourse - place de la Bourse - is little more than an unsightly, heavily trafficked pause along boulevard Anspach, but the streets on the other side of the boulevard have more appeal, with tiny place St Gery crowded by high-sided tenements, whose stone balconies and wrought-iron grilles hark back to the days of bustles and parasols. The square is thought to occupy the site of the sixth-century chapel from which the medieval city grew, but this is a matter of conjecture - no archeological evidence has ever been unearthed and the only clue to the city's early history is in its name, literally "settlement in the marshes". Place St Gery has one specific attraction in the refurbished, late nineteenth-century covered market, the Halles St Gery , an airy, glass, brick and iron edifice. The elegance of the structure is, however, obscured by a huge stone fountain plonked right in the middle - and moved here from the town of Grimbergen to the north of Brussels apparently for decorative reasons.
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