In the heart of Haspengouw, where the rolling hills of fruit orchards sweep toward the horizon, lies the quaint town of Borgloon, once capital of the medieval County of Loon. It was here, on a dewy spring morning, that Lysanne De Donder first encountered the magic of Borgloon’s annual Bloesemwandeling—the Blossom Walk. The air was thick with the scent of pink and white petals, the old Roman road beneath her feet still bearing faint stones laid centuries ago by soldiers bound for Tongeren. Lysanne, wise beyond her twenty-six years, moved among the trees as though reading silent poetry: each bough, each bud, a verse.
Lysanne’s life had been shaped by books and quiet contemplation. She was the custodian of Ten Hove Museum, a small local archive housed in a former patrician’s home on Graafbaan. There, she studied the County of Loon’s turbulent history: how Emperor Otto III once paused in Borgloon on his journey to attend the coronation of a king, how the noble Van Loon family had ruled these lands with both benevolence and steel. Yet, for all her knowledge, Lysanne remained untested by the unexpected.
As dawn gave way to sunlit optimism, the orchard paths filled with villagers clad in pastel shawls and sturdy walking boots. Stalls offered jars of apple butter from Sint-Truiden orchards, slices of cherry pie perfumed with kirsch from Maastricht distilleries, and pitchers of freshly drawn elderflower wine. At one such stall stood a man whose presence seemed incongruous among the simple displays of fruit. Tall, lean-shouldered, with hair the color of ripening barley, he arranged his wares: scraps of pale wood, fine as parchment, each labeled in precise Italian script.
Matteo Ricci was no mere traveler. A luthier from Cremona, he had journeyed through Europe in search of rare tonewoods for his violins. His reputation in Burgundy and the Black Forest was whispered among musicians; now he had come to Borgloon, drawn by tales of pearwood renowned for its resonance. He laid his pieces on velvet cloths imported from Venice, watching the villagers drift by, too absorbed in apple blossoms to notice the treasure before them.
Lysanne paused at his stall, brushing a stray chestnut curl behind her ear. She knelt to examine a pale slab of pearwood, its grain like rippling water. “It is beautiful,” she murmured. “It reminds me of the scales on a dragon carved in the late Roman Philippi.”
Matteo looked up, startled by her depth of reference. “You know history,” he said in accented French. Then, switching to English, “Forgive me—my French is clumsy.” He extended a slender hand. “I am Matteo.”
“Lysanne,” she replied, rising gracefully. Her gaze was steady, assessing the stranger with calm curiosity. “You’re here for tonewood.”
He nodded. “Borgloon’s pearwood is said to rival that of my homeland.”
She smiled, but her eyes held a question. “And will you stay to learn its secrets?”
Matteo hesitated. The festival sun warmed his shoulders. “Only if I can.”
Thus began their first conversation: an exchange of knowledge about wood density and ancient maps, of orchards and emperors. Lysanne spoke of the County of Loon’s medieval defenses, the Roman villa excavated near Gallo-Romeinse Erfgoedcentrum, and of how the land had been shaped by Bishopric disputes with Tongeren. Matteo shared tales of Stradivari’s experiments with varnish and maple. Neither spoke of mortgages nor past hurts, only of beauty and craft.
When the festival’s bell tolled midday, Lysanne offered to guide him through the orchard maze. Together, they wandered between blossom-draped lanes, their laughter mingling with birdcalls. At the summit of an ancient earthwork, the Albani Tower rising in silhouette, they paused to watch villagers below assembling for the Oogstfeest in autumn’s promise. Borgloon in springtime had sown the seeds of something neither fully understood yet both felt stirring.
Summer descended on Borgloon with a hush broken by cicadas and the distant rumble of tractors in the fields. Matteo, enchanted by Lysanne’s wisdom, extended his visit beyond what he had intended. By late June, he had rented a small room above the café De Gouden Leeuw on Bunderstraat, its windows overlooking the winding Kloosterstraat where centuries-old houses leaned as though in conversation.
Each morning, Lysanne and Matteo met at dawn beneath an old pear tree near the Fruit-Erfgoed Centrum. There, she would read passages from Cicero’s letters about friendship and love; he would show her the fine texture of wood shavings curling from his carving bench. Under her guidance, he began experimenting with Belgian pearwood, its pale heartwood imparting a warmth he had never known.
Yet as their friendship deepened, so too did the challenges that lay hidden beneath the surface of their burgeoning love. Lysanne, attuned to history’s lessons, harbored a fear: that beauty built on secrecy could crumble as quickly as a sandcastle. She carried with her the memory of Borgloon’s burned priory, destroyed in religious wars, the ancient stones blackened by betrayal. Could Matteo—this stranger from a distant land—truly be steadfast?
One evening, as twilight painted the sky in bruised purples, she led him to the edge of town, where the gravel path diverged toward the forests of Arboretum Kalmthout (though a misty memory of it lay two provinces away). Under a canopy of oaks older than the County of Loon itself, Lysanne spoke with trembling candor.
“Matteo, I have seen how love can blind the wise,” she began, voice low. “I have studied romances written in ink, but lived ones leave no margin for erasure.”
He took her hand, calloused from carving, and pressed it to his lips. “I brought no guarantees,” he confessed, “only the hope that what we craft together will endure. Like wood, love must be seasoned. It must be tested by time.”
A silence followed, the only sound the low drone of distant highway traffic—a reminder that beyond Borgloon’s pastoral charm lay a world heedless of their promise. Lysanne searched his face, saw no hollow lies, but felt her own heart pounding like a smith’s hammer on anvil.
Days passed with Matteo engrossed in his workshop, and Lysanne lost in her museum’s parchments. The physical distance between them, though small, felt like leagues. She wondered if she had demanded too much honesty before trust could bloom. He wondered if his dream of crafting a masterpiece in Belgian wood had eclipsed the fragile joy of companionship.
Their reunion came abrupt and electric. On the eve of the Peerfeest, Borgloon’s pear celebration, a summer storm rolled in from the north, lightning striking the old linden in the Markt square. The downpour was sudden; festival stalls were abandoned, musicians dashed for cover, and the pear pies steamed under plastic canopies. Matteo and Lysanne found themselves huddled together beneath a collapsed awning, the barrels of pear cider rolling dangerously close.
“You never asked me why I came here,” Matteo shouted over the wind. “It wasn’t just the wood.”
She looked up, raindrops like crystal beads in her eyelashes. “Then tell me,” she whispered.
He brushed a wet strand from her face. “I came because I believed art could forge souls together. Your wisdom, Lysanne, is the clearest melody I have ever heard.”
In that moment—lightning illuminating his earnest eyes—she felt the last barrier dissolve. The storm raged, but inside them, a calmer weather settled: the certainty that their hearts had found a congruent rhythm.
Autumn’s first chill arrived with a tapestry of red and gold across Borgloon’s orchards. The Oogstfeest, once threatened by storms, emerged gloriously: wagons laden with Quinces paraded through the Markt; villagers danced the Pruimendans, a traditional prune dance; and priests blessed the harvest under the baroque façade of Saint-Odulphus Church.
Matteo had completed his first violin from Belgian pearwood. It gleamed under lamplight in the courtyard of De Gouden Leeuw, its curves resonant with a new warmth. Lysanne guided him in setting up a small recital for the town: a gift of melody to the people who had unwittingly become part of their love story.
When the night of the concert arrived, the assembled crowd filled the cobblestone square. Torches flickered; the medieval façade of Borgloon’s Alden Biesen estate down the road seemed to lean in, curious. Lysanne stood beside Matteo, her hand in his. He lifted the violin, placed it beneath his chin, and began to play.
The first notes unfurled like tendrils of mist over the orchards. He played a movement he composed in her honor—a somber adagio that swelled with the ache of longing, then brightened into a vivace echoing laughter among blossoms. The townsfolk fell silent, moved by a beauty they did not fully understand, yet felt deeply.
Lysanne closed her eyes, tears tracing paths through the paint on her cheeks. In those notes, she heard every truth she had sought: that love, like history, is neither static nor safe, but a living tapestry woven from acts of courage. Matteo’s music embraced the past—Roman roads, Van Loon banners, pilgrim trails—and carried it forward into the unexpected future.
After the final chord faded, silence stretched until a single voice called, “Bravissimo!” Then came applause like rolling thunder. Torches flared, and the harvest wine flowed freely. Matteo and Lysanne moved through the crowd, offering embraces and wordless gratitude.
Yet as the night deepened, a shadow fell across their triumph. At the edge of the square stood Elisa Van den Broeck, Lysanne’s childhood friend, now a journalist for a Brussels paper. She clutched a notebook. “Lysanne,” she said, voice tight. “There’s someone who wishes to speak with you—Mayor Jansen.”
The mayor approached, his forehead creased. “Lysanne, I’ve received word today: Ten Hove Museum risks closure. The provincial budget for Limburg heritage has been slashed. Without your advocacy, centuries of record may vanish.”
A hush spread among those gathered. Borgloon’s heart beat faster; the threat to its history was a dagger at its throat. Lysanne felt numb, as though the world had tilted on its axis. Matteo stepped beside her, hand at the small of her back.
“She’s not alone,” he whispered.
Winter approached Borgloon with its hush and frost. Lysanne dedicated herself to petitions and meetings in Hasselt; her evenings were consumed by bureaucratic letters to the Flemish Region’s cultural council. Matteo traveled to Brussels, carrying cello and violin to play at benefit concerts, raising funds for the museum’s defense. Each effort felt like polishing a gem—small, imperceptible, yet vital.
Their love, tested by distance and duty, endured. On the night the Flemish council announced provisional funding, they walked beneath the skeletal branches of the orchard. The moon shone like an argent scythe. Lysanne’s eyes glowed with triumph and exhaustion.
“We did it,” she said, voice trembling.
“No,” Matteo corrected softly. “You did it.” He drew a slender ebony ring from his pocket, its surface carved with Celtic knots—a tribute to Borgloon’s ancient roots. “But we did it together.”
He slipped it onto her finger. In the silence, the orchard seemed to breathe—a million blossoms reborn in the silver light. Lysanne realized that their story, like the County of Loon itself, was not bound by walls or budgets or seasons. It was living history, written in shared struggles and whispered hopes.
That night, Matteo played beneath the old pear tree where they first met. His bow danced across the strings, conjuring warmth in the cold air. Lysanne listened, leaning into him, the ring heavy with promise.
In the months that followed, the museum thrived anew; the orchard bore its sweetest fruit; children of Borgloon learned history by turning pages Lysanne had saved. And Matteo’s violins, crafted from pearwood touched by spring sun and autumn rains, found their way into the hands of musicians across Europe.
But most of all, in the quiet dawns and torchlit festivals of Borgloon, Lysanne and Matteo discovered that true love demands both wisdom and courage, that history lives in every heartbeat, and that two souls, when bound by honesty and art, can change the world—one note, one bloom, one tender promise at a time.
And so their story endures, carried in the wind through the orchards of Borgloon, a romance as deep and unforgettable as the ancient roots that bind the land and its people—forever, in the County of Loon, in the province of Limburg, in the heart of Belgium.
When the first crocuses pierced the cold earth of Borgloon in early March, Lysanne De Donder felt a familiar ache in her chest—a question she’d long suppressed: what becomes of love when life pulls two souls toward different horizons?
That very month, an emissary arrived at De Gouden Leeuw with a gilded invitation: Matteo Ricci was to exhibit his latest violins at the Museo del Violino in Cremona, the city where Stradivari had first coaxed heavenly tone from pear and maple. It was a triumph that every luthier dreamed of, yet for Matteo it was bittersweet. He had fallen into a restless pattern of early mornings carving and late-night deliberations over varnish, but his thoughts always drifted to Lysanne, cataloguer of relics in a little Limburg town.
Lysanne, immersed in urgent plans to expand Ten Hove Museum’s digital archives, balanced budgets and petitions in Hasselt. She had championed virtual tours of the Gallo-Roman foundations at the Gallo-Romeins Erfgoedcentrum, inviting 3D specialists from Leuven and Liège to preserve Borgloon’s remains of the Thermen van Dorn. Still, when she walked the empty corridors of the patrician’s house at dusk, her fingers itched to hold Matteo’s hand, to feel the grain of his freshly carved scroll beneath her palm.
Their correspondence became a ritual. Each Monday, Matteo penned letters scented with oil and spruce shavings: “My dearest Lysanne, the maple you gifted me from the Pellenberg grove sings with your laughter…” He enclosed slender shavings to show the curl of grain he selected for his newest instrument. Each Wednesday, Lysanne replied with miniature sketches of medieval capitals—a Biden seal unearthed near Borgloon’s Markt, a cryptogram inscribed on a stoneslab in the ruins of Kasteel Targant—and pressed petals from the orchard’s first blossoms into her page margins.
Yet with every letter she felt the growing chasm between Belgium’s rolling hills and Lombardy’s sunlit piazzas. Matteo’s Italian improved; he wrote fewer English sentences, more Italian endearments. Lysanne’s Flemish grew richer, her sentences in French more lyrical—yet neither truly bridged the distance.
One spring evening, the bells of Saint-Odulphus tolled a vigil for Saint Bartholomew, patron of the harvest. Lysanne joined villagers along the Via Hamal, lanterns swaying, chanting antiphons that echoed among the ancient Roman milestones. She paused beneath the leaning façade of Alden Biesen, imagining Matteo retracing her steps in reverse, lantern in hand, whispering her name in the soft Italian of his journal.
That night, she dreamt he stood at the orchard’s edge, vine-covered and luminous as an icon, the wind lifting curls of his hair as he lifted a violin bow to her lips. She awakened with tears on her pillow—a promise unclaimed, a future unspoken.
A fortnight later, Matteo boarded the night train from Brussels Midi to Milano Centrale, violin cradled in its case. He left Borgloon under a curtain of April rain. In the station’s neon glare, he pressed his knuckles to the wood of his greatest creation so far—a violin he named “Lysanne” in a small notary inscription under the scroll. “May every note bear her wisdom,” he whispered.
The months that followed were taut with anticipation. Summer green clasped Borgloon’s orchards once again, ripening pears and apples under a cobalt sky. Matteo’s Cremona exhibition was hailed as a revelation—critics marveled at the pearwood’s sun-kissed warmth, at the cello’s voice that seemed to sigh with ancient sorrow. Yet, when the crowds applauded, his eyes roved above their heads, seeking a familiar silhouette he knew would not appear.
In Borgloon, Lysanne oversaw the inaugural digital unveiling of the Loonkruis, a Roman altar stone discovered at the old Loonse fort, interpreted via augmented reality for visitors worldwide. She introduced it virtually alongside the County’s charters—her dream realized, yet incomplete, for every achievement felt hollow without Matteo there to share it.
Late one evening, at the café’s empty table where they first met, Lysanne found a small parcel: inside, the violin’s scroll—detached. The instrument’s body survived, but its headstock lay severed by smugglers who had intercepted the crate on its journey home. A torn note read, “For the love that still rings true.”
Horror and grief struck her in equal measure. She rushed to Hasselt, but local police assured her the ivory peg had been taken—likely sold on the black market. The heart of the instrument lay damaged, just as her heart did at the thought of Matteo’s masterpiece mutilated in the night.
Word of the loss reached Cremona through a mutual friend, and Matteo abandoned his commitments. He boarded the first flight to Brussels, then rented a car to speed through the Ardennes, over Liège, past Sint-Truiden, to Borgloon.
They collided in the café doorway at dawn—she sprawled on the tiled floor, cradling the broken violin’s scroll; he knelt beside her, rainwater dripping from his hair. She looked up, eyes rimmed red, and in that moment the air hummed with a thousand unspoken words.
He laid his forehead against hers. “You saved Loon’s history,” he said hoarsely. “Now let me restore this.”
In the following weeks, in a tiny workshop above Graafbaan, Matteo worked by candlelight as Lysanne studied his every stroke. She ground pearwood dust into a fine paste, helped him match varnish pigments to Belgian topaz. They spoke little, but their hands sculpted the instrument’s new scroll in perfect union: his skill, her patience, their shared devotion.
When at last he raised the restored “Lysanne” to his shoulder beneath that old pear tree, the world seemed to hold its breath. He drew his bow across the G‑string. A single note rang out—a pure, crystalline resonance that trembled through oak and apple blossom alike.
It was as though the centuries of Borgloon’s history—Roman legions marching, Van Loon knights rallying banners, farmers celebrating Peerfeest—converged in that note. Lysanne closed her eyes; tears rolled unbidden. The music told of separation and reunion, of losses redeemed, of two souls who had learned that love need not anchor you in place but could carry you across continents and back again.
Under the blossoming boughs, they embraced. The orchard was empty but for birdsong and the murmuring wind in the leaves. Borgloon’s spirit—the wisdom of its stones, the song of its orchards—settled around them like a blessing.
In the years that followed, Lysanne toured alongside the Loonkruis’s digital exhibit: on concert stages of Munich and Madrid, in the vaulted halls of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and in schoolrooms where children learned Latin through the County of Loon’s charters. Lysanne and Matteo divided their time between Borgloon and Cremona, each place enriched by the other’s art and history.
Every spring, they returned to the orchard. Lysanne guided Matteo through the Bloesemwandeling as she once had, her fingers linked with his, his violin case perched on his shoulder like a lover’s promise. And in autumn, they joined the Oogstfeest, dancing the Pruimendans among villagers who marvelled at the devotion that had borne such fruit.
Their love became legend in Limburg, a living testament that even amid the ebb of time and the shifting contours of the world, two hearts aligned by curiosity, courage, and unwavering honesty could compose a symphony eternal—one note, one blossom, one heartbeat at a time.
For more information check these posts:
- Spotting beautiful blossoms along the Haspengouw Bloesemroute
- Haspengouw Bloesemroute
- A Day at Belgian Haspengouw Blossoms
- Belgium Blossom Spotting: How to see Haspengouw this Spring
- The blossoms of Haspengouw
- Discover the Blossoms of Belgium | Haspengouw
- Blossoms Walks in Limburg: A Springtime Guide to Blooming Orchards
- 5 colorful spring walks in Belgium
- Day out in blossom country – Belgium’s beautiful Haspengouw
- 3x een verborgen herfstwandeling in Haspengouw
- Uitstap: Arboretum Kalmthout in de winter
- Arboretum w Kalmthout – Blog o Antwerpii, ale nie tylko
- Cocooning in de bomen van het Arboretum Kalmthout
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