The Stadhuis on the Grote Markt is the most ornate civic building in Flanders, a wedding cake of Brabantine Gothic stonework completed in 1469 under the dukes of Burgundy. Every niche on every facade was meant for a statue, but the medieval sculpture program was never finished. The figures you see today, three hundred and odd of them, were added in the nineteenth century by a city government that wanted to complete what its ancestors had begun. Across the square, the Sint-Pieterskerk holds the original Romanesque crypt from the eleventh century beneath a Gothic shell that took a hundred and fifty years to build. Both buildings survived two world wars by a combination of luck and German restraint. The houses around them did not. Most of what looks medieval on the square is reconstruction, marked with a small carved 1914 on the stone if you know where to look.

In August 1914, advancing German troops burned central Leuven over five nights as a reprisal for alleged civilian resistance. They specifically targeted the University Library on the Ladeuzeplein and destroyed it, three hundred thousand books and a thousand medieval manuscripts gone in one night. The library was rebuilt with American donations between the wars, partly funded by Herbert Hoover, who would later help rebuild Belgium after a different war. In May 1940 the Germans burned it again. Nine hundred thousand books, lost a second time. The current building, the one with the carillon tower visible from anywhere in the city, is the third version on the same foundations. The bookplates from the rebuilt collection still read with quiet anger: this library was destroyed twice by German armies, restored twice by friends of Belgium.

The Oude Markt is a small square ringed by something like forty-five bars and restaurants, almost all of which spill out onto the cobblestones in fine weather. The local nickname is the longest bar in Europe. On a Wednesday in October, with the academic year in full swing, the square holds several thousand students drinking eight-euro pitchers of pils and arguing about politics. Belgian beer culture is taken seriously here in a way it is not elsewhere; a Westvleteren Twelve will be served in the correct chalice, at the correct temperature, by a bartender who can name the abbey. The legal drinking age for beer is sixteen. The result, in a town of forty thousand undergraduates, is a centuries-old experiment in what a city does when it accepts that this is just what young people do.

Walk south from the Grote Markt for ten minutes and the city changes. The Groot Begijnhof, founded in the thirteenth century, is a small village of brick houses and chapels enclosed by walls, originally home to lay religious women who lived in community without taking vows. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the Flemish Beguinages, and KU Leuven now uses it as faculty housing. The cobbled lanes between the houses are absolutely silent at any hour. Five minutes further west, the Kruidtuin is the oldest botanical garden in Belgium, founded in 1738 to grow medicinal plants for the university's medical faculty. Both places work as breaks from the noise. Both are also reminders that the university here predates Belgium by four centuries and shaped almost everything around them.