Bucharest has always been the favourite shop window of Romanian politics; no serious observer will take into account the political turmoil of the provinces, for whatever really matters will only happen in the capital. In the first half of the century, two other buildings were raised here that were almost ostentatiously meant to serve the political sphere. First, the house of the present Town-hall, built in 1906-1911, between the Cismigiu Park and Splaiul Dimbovitei, and designed by the distinguished architect Petre Antonescu; the building stood admirably through the German bombing of August 1944, yet nearly collapsed in recent years when a mayor who emerged out of the bubbling waters of December 1989, had the idea to plant two cement lions (a gift coming from China) at the entrance of the building, in sheer contradiction with the style of the whole. Second, there was the Victoria Palace (at one end of the Victoria Road - main axis of the city), built later on, starting with 1937; headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then of the Government of the country, the Victoria Palace has been from the very beginning a symbol of a town that will always re-emerge out of the ashes of its own tradition. It was erected close to the former Sturdza Palace, which was demolished shortly after the new building was finished. Itself damaged by the 1944 bombings, the Victoria Palace remained, in both literal and figurative senses, at the center of our political life, even after December 1989. It was to become the witness of what everybody else in Bucharest and in Romania witnessed in this period: people "emanated" from the revolution, luxury cars and ambulances, protest movements and miners; the façade of the palace was long afterwards left to bear the traces of those days.

During the first decades of the century, Bucharest was one of the European towns that became famous as centers of modernist art and literature; the taste for innovation and experiment that seems to be the enduring hallmark of the city did reach then its peak. Yet it was not only the modernists who felt at home in Bucharest; just like Caragiale or Mihai Eminescu in a previous epoch, a whole intellectual generation was to make the streets, parks, flavours and rhythms of the city part of their own destinies. Mircea Eliade?s reveries, the readings and passions of women like Jeni Acterian or Alice Voinescu, the joys and pains of Mihail Sebastian, all speak of a young generation ready to taste both the apparent spleen of their town and the unmistakable wine of its underlying dynamism. In the summer of 1940, Rosie Waldeck, an American journalist gifted with the finesse of a German countess (or a countess with journalistic insight and sharpness, it?s quite the same thing), comes to Bucharest and feels the pulse of the whole country simply by closely observing the life on the Victoria Road. She was persuaded that this boulevard was the most important avenue in South-Eastern Europe, just as the hotel she was staying in ? the Athenée Palace ? was, in a way, not only the unofficial core of the country, but the diplomatic center of the Balkans too. She was quite right.