The Painted Lake Town: How Lucerne Reads on Foot

Lucerne wears two faces, and the pleasure of walking it on foot is reading both at once. On the surface it is a painted resort town where the River Reuss leaves the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons: covered wooden bridges, frescoed merchant squares, and paddle steamers setting out toward Mount Pilatus and Mount Rigi. Underneath runs a harder history. This was a poor cantonal town that sent its young men abroad as hired soldiers, and a settlement that ringed itself in stone because it knew it needed walls. Take the walk slowly and both faces come into a single view: the bright picture and the fortress underneath it, the carnival fountain and the dying lion. Two self-guided tours in Lucerne walking tours trace this doubleness, one along the river and one up into the harder history behind the postcards.

The river reads in two bridges

Start where every image of the city starts. The Old Town and Chapel Bridge walk opens at the Kapellbruecke, the covered wooden footbridge that zigzags across the green Reuss beside a stout octagonal stone tower standing in the water. It was built about thirteen sixty as part of the town's fortifications, and Lucerne Tourism records it as among the oldest covered wooden bridges in Europe. Set into the triangular gables of its rafters hang painted panels, one hundred and fifty-eight of them commissioned in sixteen eleven and painted by the local artist Hans Heinrich Waegmann. On the eighteenth of August nineteen ninety-three a fire tore through the bridge and destroyed roughly two thirds of those paintings. The people of Lucerne rebuilt it in about eight months and reopened it on the fourteenth of April nineteen ninety-four. So the marquee image of Switzerland is both very old and, in part, very new: a medieval townscape almost lost to flame and raised again.

The Water Tower beside it is older still, raised about thirteen hundred, roughly thirty years before the bridge. It rises about thirty-four and a half metres and its history is not gentle. Over the centuries it held the town archives, kept here until nineteen nineteen, the cantonal treasury and war plunder, and in its lower reaches a prison and torture chamber used until the late eighteenth century. Lucerne Tourism calls the tower and bridge together the most photographed scene in Switzerland. The lovely picture and the hard old fortress are the same object.

Downstream waits the dark mirror. The Spreuerbruecke, its south wing built about fourteen oh eight, carries a complete Dance of Death under its roof, painted by Kaspar Meglinger in the earlier seventeenth century. It is counted the largest known cycle of its kind, sixty-seven paintings originally, of which about forty-five survive. The Dance of Death is a moral image in which Death comes for every rank in turn, the pope and the beggar alike, meant to level the living. Read the two bridges as a pair, one luminous and reborn, one grave, and the whole river makes sense: beauty and its shadow standing side by side.

The painted squares and the councils that ruled them

Between the bridges lie the linked squares that gathered the life of the city for centuries. The finest is the Weinmarkt, the Wine Market, closed on every side by tall merchant and former guild houses whose facades are painted and frescoed. At its centre stands a late-Gothic fountain by the sculptor Konrad Lux, dated fourteen eighty-one. The square's history runs into the story of Switzerland itself: citizens of Lucerne are recorded swearing allegiance to the Confederation here in thirteen thirty-two, the year the town joined Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. For two centuries it was also a stage for the Lucerne Passion Play, and a full stage plan of the fifteen eighty-three performance still survives.

From the Weinmarkt the squares open one into another, the Hirschenplatz with its frescoed houses protected as historical monuments, and the Kornmarkt, the old grain market, where a public trading hall and granary was built about thirteen seventy. On the Kornmarkt stands the Old Town Hall, rebuilt between sixteen oh two and sixteen oh six by the architect Anton Isenmann. Its walls follow Italian Renaissance style; over them spreads a great overhanging Swiss hipped roof. The Small and Grand Councils of Lucerne met under that roof until seventeen ninety-eight, the year the old order fell in revolution. The eye reads Italy in the walls and Switzerland in the roof, one building holding both, which is how a small alpine republic dressed its power.

The walk closes across the water at the Jesuitenkirche, the pink-and-white Baroque church of Saint Francis Xavier, consecrated in sixteen seventy-seven and recorded as the first large Baroque church built in Switzerland, modelled on the Gesu in Rome. Its onion-domed towers were finished only in eighteen ninety-three. It rose in the Counter-Reformation, when Catholic Lucerne held its ground against Protestant Zurich upstream, where Huldrych Zwingli had preached from fifteen nineteen. Here the answer to the Reformation was a church of light and colour, confident and Roman.

The soldiers' city behind the postcards

The second walk turns to the harder history the squares only hint at. The Lion Monument and Musegg Wall tour begins at the Loewendenkmal, a colossal dying lion carved into a sandstone cliff above a still pool, a broken spear in its side. It was designed by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and cut into the rock by the stonemason Lukas Ahorn between eighteen twenty and eighteen twenty-one. The lion mourns the Swiss Guards, mercenary soldiers of the French king, killed defending the Tuileries Palace in Paris on the tenth of August seventeen ninety-two. For centuries the poor cantons sent their young men abroad as hired soldiers, and the lion holds that memory. Mark Twain, who stood here in eighteen eighty, called it the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world.

From the memorial the route climbs to the Museggmauer, Lucerne's second ring of fortifications, raised from the fourteenth century along the ridge above the town. Its best-preserved stretch dates to around thirteen eighty-six, the same period as the Battle of Sempach against the Habsburg Duke Leopold the Third. A town fresh from war understood plainly why it needed stone. At about eight hundred and seventy metres it is the longest surviving town wall in Switzerland, with nine of its original towers still standing and four open to climb. From the Zytturm, which holds the oldest clock in Lucerne with a mechanism dated fifteen thirty-five, the town, the lake and the Alps come into one frame.

Below the wall stands the Hofkirche Sankt Leodegar, the twin-spired court church on a monastery site that dates to the middle of the eighth century, older than the town itself. Its two Gothic towers survived the Easter fire of sixteen thirty-three and were built into the church rebuilt between sixteen thirty-three and sixteen thirty-nine. The walk ends at the lakefront, where the first paddle steamer, the Stadt Luzern, made its maiden voyage in eighteen thirty-seven, and where the Vitznau to Rigi line of eighteen seventy-one, the first rack railway in Europe, helped make Lucerne one of the birthplaces of Alpine tourism. Two faces, one town, best read at your own unhurried pace.

Sources

• Old Town: The Chapel Bridge and the Painted Squares, Roamer self-guided tour, Lucerne
• Lion Monument: The Dying Lion and the Wall of Towers, Roamer self-guided tour, Lucerne
• Lucerne Tourism, official visitor information on the Chapel Bridge, Water Tower and Musegg Wall
• Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (1880), on the Lion Monument