Solothurn

Solothurn is on the Aare between Bern and Basel, and it is the most complete baroque town in Switzerland — the result of two hundred years as the seat of the French ambassador to the Swiss Confederation, whose presence brought French money, French architects and French taste.

It is also the town of eleven, and this is not a marketing invention.

The eleven

Solothurn joined the Confederation as the eleventh canton in 1481, and took the number as its own with a thoroughness that is hard to explain and impossible to miss:

• eleven churches and chapels
• eleven fountains
• eleven towers
• the Cathedral of St. Ursus has eleven altars and eleven bells, and its grand staircase rises in three flights of eleven steps
• the town clock had eleven hours on its face
• the local beer is called Öufi — dialect for eleven — and is brewed at 11 hours 11 minutes

Nobody can fully account for it. The town has simply committed.

The cathedral

St. Ursen, built 1762–1773 by an architect from Ticino, is the great set piece: white and grey stone, a broad staircase with fountains on either side, and a tower you can climb.

It is regarded as the first significant neoclassical church in Switzerland, and the view from the top over the ochre roofs to the Jura is the photograph of Solothurn.

The old town

Small, walled and almost entirely intact: two surviving town gates, the Zeitglockenturm with an astronomical clock and figures that move on the hour, arcaded streets, and the fountains — the Mauritius, the Samson, the St. George — each with a painted figure on a column.

The Museum Altes Zeughaus holds one of the largest collections of armour in Europe, several hundred suits of it, in the old arsenal.

The Kunstmuseum has, among other things, the Madonna in Strawberries, a small and very fine early-sixteenth-century panel that is the town’s treasure.

The Aare

The river runs through the middle, swimmable in summer like the one in Bern and with the same warnings about current. Boats run downstream to Biel/Bienne and beyond through the Aare canals, a slow and rather beautiful three-hour trip through the marshland.

Nearby

• The Verena gorge — a wooded ravine at the edge of town with hermitages cut into the rock and a chapel; a hermit still lives there, appointed by the town, which is the last such post in Switzerland
• Weissenstein — the Jura ridge above, reached by cable car, with the whole Alpine chain laid out on the horizon on a clear day
• Biel/Bienne — half an hour, and bilingual
• Bern — 40 minutes

Getting there

• By train — Bern 40 minutes, Basel 45 minutes, Zurich about an hour and a quarter.
• On foot — the old town is five minutes from the station across the river.

When to go

Any time. Late January brings one of the older carnivals in Switzerland, and the Solothurn Film Festival — the main showcase for Swiss cinema — fills the town for a week the same month.