A Taste of Basel
Head to Basel – a new KLM destination – to revel in its artistic peaks and design contrasts, says Anna Whitehouse
PHOTOGRAPHY MARK NIEDERMAN
"Will I do this forever? No. Just until I die." These are the words of Basel’s fährimaa (or ferry man), Jacques Thurneysen, the captain of a creaking, engine-less boat that schleps people across the River Rhine on a rickety pulley system.
A former cabinet-maker who trained to be a professional gondolier in Venice, 61-year-old Thurneysen epitomises the hard graft that is synonymous with Baselites – come rain or shine, he is there, merrily rebounding offthe banks of Grossbasel and Kleinebasel, the city’s two opposing sides.
He also wears sandals despite the 10 degree Celsius climes.
A city built around the vast, meandering Rhine, locals say Basel sits on the ‘knee’ of the river, although on a map it looks more like a bulbous nose. Either way, water is of the essence in this small hub (167,000 people at the last count) in the northwest of Switzerland. There are 173 ornate fountains, including one depicting a monkey guzzling wine in Andreasplatz, that punctuate the city’s winding, cobbled streets. They each pump out mountain-fresh H20 for all and sundry to glug back, and the earthy taste is in many ways superior to the bottled variety (as is the price).
"We are men of tradition," beams Herr Stefan Schiesser, a fifth-generation chocolatier at Confiserie Schiesser on the town’s heaving Marktplatz. His 149-year-old shop overlooks the rustic red façade of the Town Hall, which houses a bombastic statue of a scantily-clad Munatius Plancus, the man who allegedly founded Basel under Caesar’s rule.
"I tried to introduce chilli chocolate once," he continues, "but there was a mini revolt – the belief is that we have done a good job in the first place, so why mess with that?"
This may seem blinkered, but after a few days nibbling truffles from the slew of confectioners that command the city’s fin de siècle buildings, it is easy to see his point.
The chocolate – much like everything, right down to the bottle green trams that run with the sort of efficiency usually reserved for military operations – is of such high quality that it requires no embellishment. Inside his ornate, sweet-smelling shop, behind the shelves of intricately-latticed sweets that look like rows of tiny, hand-decorated suburban houses, sits 93-year-old Frau Hesser, reading the Basler Zeitung, the city’s local rag.
She dunks a läckerli – a honey, hazelnut, orange peel and Kirsch biscuit into a rich, frothy hot chocolate with the kind of gusto usually reserved for an E-colour-fuelled toddler. Frau Hesser comes to Schiesser every day at 3.15pm, on the dot. She also knows fährimaa Jacques Thurneysen well.
Small Basel may be, but its impressive roster of museums certainly puts it on the map. Rudolf Suter, a local tour guide, reckons there are 40 museums. In the centre, near the imposing Munster Tower in Grossbasel, there seems to be one every 200 metres.
Whether it is bones at the Natural History Museum’s suitably-named ‘Hard Graft ‘ exhibition, which centres around a pipe-smoking man called Theo, whose skeleton was found in a recent excavation; teddy bears at the rather eerie Puppenhausmuseum, where more than 34,000 wide-eyed soft toys are cuddled up; or knock-out art (the Max Beckmann exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, running to 22 January, has silenced many a visitor), this hoarding instinct is inherent to the city.
"I know someone who has 10,000 Mickey Mouses," says Dagmar Vergeat, curator of her own tiny Hoosesagg (or trouser pocket) museum on Nadelberg, a narrow, historic street that was once the home of the city’s spice merchants. "And another who has a house filled from top to bottom with angels that he invites everyone to see at Christmas."
With her own collection of random items that includes 69 Pez dispensers, 56 cartoon wine stoppers, the first ever Swatch and 2,134 postcards, Vergeat, it appears, is cut from the same cloth.
The Don of stashing, however, is the late Ernst Beyeler. A Swiss art collector with a weakness for Picasso, Monet, Warhol and Louise Bourgeois, he has unveiled his entire collection in a rural spot called the Fondation Beyeler.
The building alone, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, is worth the 15-minute tram ride out of town; a waterlily pond outside reflects dappled sunshine onto Monet’s famous ‘Waterlily Pond’ inside.
It’s the sort of art and design synergy that has secured Basel the affections of the art world’s elite.
"I am sure I have met Warhol," boasts Luciano, a rotund Italian waiter with a rogueish twinkle in his eye, who has worked in Chez Donati, for 34 years.
There’s no pomp or ceremony as Luciano dollops vanilla crème onto a plate with the panache of a dinner lady serving up sausages and mash. His silver-domed dessert tray brimming with tiramisu, plum tart and chocolate torte, however, is worthy of exhibition space.
Food here is rustic, hearty and designed for adventurous folk looking to scramble up the nearby Wasserfallen, a hiking spot in the Jura Mountains, 45-minutes out of town. A short cable car ride up a postcard-perfect mountainside that looks like a scene from an intricate Constable painting, and you’re deposited at the start of this popular climb.
The silence here is only penetrated by the occasional belch from a post-fondue climber. "Pardon me," chortles Andreas Gilman, a hulking figure, swaddled in high-tech Gortex.
"I ate my lunch too quickly," he bellows cheerily before greeting a fellow walker with a firm "Grüezi", and pushing on through a leafy thicket, followed by his slightly more athletic sheepdog Heinrich.
For everything that goes up, there must be a way down, and for the last two years the best way to descend this grassy monolith is on a green, self-powered scooter called a trotti. Red helmets strapped on, the hordes of euphoric hikers that take this unconventional route down resemble Christmas elves, as their cajoling and squawking echoes gently around the moss-covered, rocky ravines. The sheer rush of weaving down a mountain alongside a babbling river is worth the hour-long slog up to the peak.
The trotti may be a bold new venture for this traditional province, but with the wind in your hair and the orange-yellow glow of the sun setting on the snow-capped mountains ahead, there’s a chance even the fährimaa might like it.
Grand designs
The birthplace of architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron – designers of London’s Tate Modern and Beijing’s Olympic Stadium – Basel is shaping up to be as significant in modernist terms as nearby La Chaux-de-Fonds, Le Corbusier’s birthplace. View the Stellwerk signal box, their most revered Basel work, from the Munchensteiner railway bridge: this shimmering hulk of a building is sheathed in horizontal copper strips, twisted to allow daylight to penetrate.
The art and design themes continue over the border in Germany. A 20-minute bus journey towards Weil am Rhein (make sure to bring your passport), offers up Vitra Design Museum, a veritable Mecca to furniture design, from Shaker style through Rietveld and Charles Eames to Robert Venturi.
Basel fact file
HOW TO GET THERE
KLM operates two direct daily flights to Basel/Mulhouse EuroAirport from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.
WHERE TO STAY
The 19th-century Krafft (www.hotelkrafft.ch) sits in an enviable spot on the Rhine. Chic and contemporary, it is in a great location for navigating both Grossbasel and Kleinbasel and is where author Hermann Hesse penned the novel Steppenwolf. Arty folk should try the Teufelhof (www.teufelhof.com): a different artist has decked out each of the nine rooms, so you might find yourself sleeping next to a modernist painting, avante garde sculpture, or post modern light installation.
WHAT TO DO
The annual Fasnacht festival (www.fasnacht.ch) in February is one of the city’s biggest pulls. At 4am at the beginning of this three-day shindig, all streetlights are turned out, hordes of drummers and piccolo players congregate and the party begins. For a more sophisticated night on the tiles, the Kunsthalle art gallery (www.kunsthallebasel.ch) offers up mojitos and arty merriment. The city’s bright young things tend to gather at hot new spot Acqua (www.acquabasilea.ch), a bar in a former waterworks.
FURTHER INFORMATION
www.basel.com www.myswitzerland.com
