january-2012

TRAVEL SWITZERLAND
32 Holland Herald
CLOCKWISE FROM
ABOVE
Jacques
Thurneysen steers
a course across
the Rhine; the
Kunstmuseum
courtyard; a
gargoyle sneers at
the hills
“We are men of tradition,”
beams Herr Stefan Schiesser, a fi ft hgeneration
chocolatier at Confi serie
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 fi rst place, so
why mess with that?”
Th is may seem blinkered, but aft er a
few days nibbling truffl es from the slew
of confectioners that command the
city’s fi n de siècle buildings, it is easy to
see his point.
Th e chocolate – much like
everything, right down to the bottle
green trams that run with the sort of
effi ciency 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 Th urneysen 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