Basel

What lovely city! The Outside the main cathedral, the Münster, there is a fabulous square, Münsterplatz. Photos coming.

On Friday I started out doing a walking tour of the greater old city, and explored spots along the Rhine, starting with St. Alban-Kirche built around 1270. This millwheel is nearby.

The dates given for these posts can be a day later than here in Switzerland. It is Saturday evening as I type this, but because this blog is registered in Australian time, when I create a new post it is atuomatically dated as Sunday 7 October.


These are pictures from Saturday . . .

This is Basel Spanlentor, a gate which was part of the walled city. It dates from 1370, but the walls themselves were destroyed in the 19th century.



The Rathaus is on square normally occupied by stall-holders selling everthing from cheese to trinkets. There's a busy tram stop here too.


The Historisches Museum Barfusserplatz is Basel’s history museum. It is housed in what was a Franciscan church built in the 1300s. Amongst the relics and sculptures on display is a series of stained glass windows. This one show a portative organ. David tells me he's having one made. Basel has a wonderful academy of music at which David specialised in ancient music, particularly that which would have been played on the clavicytherium.


David took me to the University library where he was keen to see an exibition featuring a woman he knew when livig in Basel 40 years ago, the Swiss mezzo-soprano Elsa Cavelti. She's made her debut in Poland in 1936, and worked with the State Theatre of Beuthen (Silesia, near Bytom, Poland), in Düsseldorf and at the National Opera of Dresden, City Theatre of Zürich as dramatic alto. She sang on the principal European and American stages and was know for her premiers of the works of Swiss composers like Paul Huber, Othmar Schoek, Frank Martin, Willy Burkhard and Rudolf Kelterborn. She became a highly respected teacher and died in Basel in 2001.