You are now on the Meir, the busiest shopping street in Antwerp, and I have brought you here to tell you this city’s founding story. Look at that smooth bronze hand, severed cleanly at the wrist, lying there among thousands of hurrying feet. Children love it. They crouch down and climb on the fingers, while shoppers walk past it without a second glance. It looks like a strange piece of modern street art, and it is, but it is also a small echo of the founding story of the city, the story of a giant, a soldier, and a hand thrown into the river. The story goes like this. Long, long ago, a fearsome giant named Druon Antigoon lived beside the river Scheldt and controlled who could pass along it. He demanded a toll from every boatman who wanted to use the river, and if anyone refused to pay, the giant would seize them, cut off one of their hands, and throw it into the water. A monstrous tyrant, taking hands and casting them into the river, year after year. Then along came a hero, the Roman soldier Silvius Brabo, who fought the giant, defeated him, and gave him a taste of his own cruelty. He cut off the giant's hand, and he threw it into the Scheldt. And here is the piece that ties everything together. In the local telling, the Dutch words for hand throwing are hand werpen, and from this comes the name Antwerpen or Antwerp. So, the city, quite literally, was named after a thrown hand. And this explains why you’ll find hands all over the city. Once you start noticing them, you will see hands on buildings, on biscuits, on monuments, all the way to the end of this tour. Follow the map to a rather serious-looking building that changed how the entire world does business.