The Baselites have this extremely helpful habit of painting the year of construction right above the doors of their houses. Of course, left to a history-nerd father-and-daughter team, one of whom is armed with an audioguide and the other with a passion for historical architecture, any city tour inevitably turns into a scavenger hunt for the oldest building.
I think the winner was 1291, with 1333 being a close runner-up. Somehow I got photos of neither of these. Picture a skinny four-story house with two columns of windows with shutters. That’s most houses in Basel. Without those numbers above the doors, it would be absolutely impossible to sequence anything; successive remodels have left thirteenth-century houses looking remarkably like nineteenth-century houses.
The state of preservation of parts of the medieval town is incredible. I can only imagine how magnificent it could have been, had an earthquake in the 1300s not leveled most of what was there at the time, including much of the cathedral begun in 1000.
As we passed a coffeeshop on the ground floor of a house marked 1437, I insinuated that I would like to be able to post something about the taste of history, but alas, Dad missed the hint, so I shall never know.
This one’s from 1525:
