Strasbourg

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Cathédrale Notre-Dame 1,500 points

  Pink sandstone, and you will pick it out from streets away well before you stand under it. Three hundred and thirty steps get you onto the platform. Then back at ground level, once a day at a fixed hour, something in the south transept begins to move. I am not telling you what. Main course.

• Église protestante Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune 500 points

  Walk round the side and find the cloister. It is older than the walls above it, and hardly anyone goes through. Then step in and look up: the vaulting is painted from one end to the other, and you will be a while.

• Église protestante Saint-Thomas 500 points

  Five aisles, all of them the same height, and the only one in Alsace built like that. The organ is a Silbermann and Mozart played on it. Step out again and the water is right against the masonry: this is the corner where the noise stops. I would lie here.

• Église Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux 500 points

  One roof, two churches, a wall down the middle. Catholics on one side, Lutherans on the other, sharing the place for three hundred years and more. In 2012 somebody put a door through the wall. Count the ways in as you go round.

• Opéra du Rhin 500 points

  Columns across the front and a row of figures along the roof, every one of them looking out across the open ground at everybody else. See it from the far end, walking towards it. That is the view it was put there for.

• Palais Rohan 500 points

  It backs onto the water, and the river side is the one it was built to be seen from. Hardly anybody walks round to look. Three museums live in there, and the oldest things in the city are down in the cellars, which is the correct place for old things.

• Ancienne douane 250 points

  Stand on the crossing opposite and take in the length of it. It is a shed, it has never pretended otherwise, and after a morning of decorated fronts that comes as a relief. The waterside is the good side. Everything here used to face the water.

• Aubette 1928 250 points

  The long pale face on the biggest square of this level, and the least interesting part of the whole thing. What is worth the detour is up the stairs and invisible from the pavement. Two street names a minute away belong to the people who did it.

• Église Saint-Étienne 250 points

  The far east corner, and the emptiest walking on this level. Roman masonry turned up under the floor in here, found by people who were looking for something else. Out and back is a long way, and every metre of it counts.

• Hôtel de la Préfecture 250 points

  You are not going in this one. It has a job. So all you get of it is the outside, and the outside is enough: the railings, the gates, and a run of stone that keeps going for longer than you expect.

• Hôtel de Ville 250 points

  A private mansion before the council moved in, and it never quite stopped looking like one. The gateway was cut for carriages, not for people. Stand in the middle of it and look up, before somebody drives through.

• Ponts Couverts 250 points

  The far west end, where the water splits into four arms and one crossing follows straight on from the next. Twenty paces past them is the Vauban dam, and the terrace on its top is where the picture you have already seen was taken from. Go up, turn round, come down, then eat the crossings properly.

• Tour du Bourreau 250 points

  Off on its own at the west end, squat and heavy, with the river on two sides. Everything around it has been rebuilt at least once and this has not. Put a hand on the stone as you pass. Six centuries of weather is a texture, and texture is most of what I have.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Two Roman roads met here, one coming up from Basel and one heading off towards Metz by Saverne, and the camp went in where they crossed. The Ill did the rest of the work. It was about a hundred metres wide then, three times what you see now, and it closed the south side without anybody having to build a thing. Roads on one side, water on the other. I would have picked it too.

Sources: www.larousse.fr, www.musees.strasbourg.eu

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

12 BC–400

Rome. A camp went up in 12 BC and the legions stayed for something like four hundred years. By the fourth century the walls had reached their largest, and that is the outline still lying under the modern streets. Everything built here since has been set down on a rectangle drawn by men who were told where to put it.

Sources: www.strasbourg.eu, www.musees.strasbourg.eu

982–1201

The bishop. In 982 the emperor Otto II handed him the powers of a count, which made him the real sovereign of Strasbourg, and for two centuries the man in the cathedral was also the man who ran the town. Then the better-off townspeople went looking for a bigger patron than their bishop, and they found one.

Sources: www.larousse.fr

1201–1681

The town itself. In 1201 the emperor Philip of Swabia declared it a free imperial city, with nobody in between. A charter around 1214 set up a council of nobles and burghers to administer the place, and in 1332 the craft guilds pushed twenty-five seats of their own into it. Four hundred and eighty years of a town arguing with itself about who sits where. It ended on 30 September 1681.

Sources: www.larousse.fr

1681–1870

France. Louis XIV put an end to its independence on 30 September 1681, annexing the city to the kingdom as part of his policy of reunions. Nearly two centuries followed in which nobody asked who this island belonged to. Quiet centuries are the ones I remember least, and I have had a lot of practice at remembering.

Sources: www.larousse.fr, www.strasbourg.eu

1870–

Then everybody, in turn. The city belonged to the German Empire from 1870 to 1918 and was annexed again from 1940 to 1944, so by its own reckoning it changed nationality four times between 1870 and 1945. It has been French since, and it now houses European institutions that exist because of all that. I am a rock. I stayed where I was.

Sources: www.strasbourg.eu

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. Four of the streets on this level are a Roman camp. Rue des Hallebardes, carried on by Rue des Juifs, is the via praetoria, the main way in. Rue Brûlée runs along the camp's inner ring road, the one the legion used to get round the wall quickly. Rue des Veaux sits on the rampart itself. The camp is gone. Its floor plan is still being walked on, two thousand years after the last person needed it.

   Sources: www.musees.strasbourg.eu

2. Gutenberg spent about ten years here, traceable from 1434, living out by the old Saint-Arbogast monastery and making engraved metal badges for pilgrims. When his partners took him to court, witnesses let things slip: a new art, a press, forms of metal. He left in the middle of the 1440s and printed his famous book somewhere else. A square and a street here carry his name, which is what a town does about the one that got away.

   Sources: lirenotremonde.strasbourg.eu

3. What is protected here is not a building. It is the island. The Grande Île went onto the world heritage list in 1988, whole, and in 2017 the listing was stretched across the water over the Neustadt as well. The city's protection plan grew with it, from 73 hectares to 210. Everything under your feet today sits inside the smaller number.

   Sources: www.culture.gouv.fr

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 190streets
• 1,667dots
• 26.5km of street
• 33.0km on foot
• 9.4hours at a stroll