Lucerne

This weekend Emilie and I visited Lucerne for some sightseeing and to see a performance at the Lucerne Music Festival. This was my second visit to Lucerne and Emilie’s first, thus qualifying the city as one of the few in Europe that I had visited before her (sadly, I considered this an accomplishment on my part...).

We made the roughly two hour drive on Saturday morning and the rain along the way did not bode well for the weather on our first day. Fortunately the rain lightened up a bit by the time that we arrived and after checking into the hotel we made our way out to see some of the city.

We began with a walk across the Chapel Bridge and then did a quick tour of the old town before heading up to see the Museggmauer – the remains of a medieval fortification that is in the hills above the city. From the walkway atop the Museggmauer there is a nice view of the city.

After a quick lunch we visited the Bourbaki Panorama, which houses an 1881 panoramic painting that depicts a scene from the Franco-Prussian war (1870/71) during which the French ultimately retreated into Switzerland. While the painting was interesting, the most impressive aspect is the actual size – 114 meters in circumference and over 10 meters high.

Our next stop was the Löwendenkmal (Lion Monument), which commemorates the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution as revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris. I had missed the monument during my first Lucerne visit, so I was particularly interested to see it this time. The lion is carved directly into natural rock and was much larger than I expected.

Mark Twain is said to have praised the sculpture of the mortally-wounded lion as "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world."

Our last tourist activity of the day was a visit to the Rosengart Museum. The museum’s collection includes primarily works by Klee and Picasso, as well as an assortment of works by Cézanne, Matisse, Monet, Chagall, Renoir, Miró and Kandinsky. Overall I enjoyed the museum – the photos of Picasso taken by David Duncan Douglas were particularly interesting – though I’m not a big fan of Klee’s work.

Here’s a picture that I took of the old town during our walk back to the hotel. The Chapel Bridge is in the foreground.

For dinner we hiked all over Lucerne before finally finding a nice restaurant that apparently was originally the home of a medieval guild of some sort. The interior was interesting and lined with the crests of the many guild members.