![]() ![]() Twelve guild houses, embellished with symbols of their respective trades, remain in town as does the Romanesque All Saints Cathedral, built in the 11th Century. Their faces are painted on buildings and their gnomons are fashioned from wrought iron. We saw a wine maker’s house that displayed a tangle of painted grapevines and a prosperous merchant’s fresco that told a tale of Greek heroes.Ĭlocks, everywhere in Switzerland, are sometimes simple sundials here. Copper gargoyles, dragon-shaped drain spouts, wrought-iron signs, sculptured designs and lively and elaborate scenes, all symbolic of the original family’s profession, aspirations or status, decorate the buildings. Vividly painted oriel windows, nearly 180 of them, have been meticulously restored. You can’t let the upscale shops, interesting as they might be, distract you from the abundance of detail on these stucco or timber-framed buildings. You can see a different life here in contrast to Alpine Switzerland, where the towns, attractive as they are, have generally been given over to tourism.ĭown steep paths from the Munot, we entered the car-free part of town by the Swabian Gate, which is complete with clock tower and the inscription: “Blockhead, open your eyes.” They have banned cars in one section and approved special lighting that blends with the old facades. City officials have taken steps to preserve the architecture and street patterns from undue 20th-Century influences. The bustling city below is an architectural prize. From it we could look over the river and the old tile roofs onto parts of the original town walls that flank the fortress. The fortress, in which a watchman and his family still live, dominates the town. We got our bearings at the 400-year-old Munot fortress, whose circular keep was based on a design attributed to German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer. Mercifully, they are sited discreetly and impose little upon the landscape. Schaffhausen, population 34,000, proclaims itself an industrial city, and high-tech manufacturing plants and generating stations do exist. ![]()
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