Lucerne's old town is a jumble of cobblestone streets, alleyways, tunnels and squares, and if you walk around them you realize how things worked when Lucerne wasn't a city at all, but a little town on a river, seven centuries ago.
Our hotel sat in a little alley off the Kornmarkt, named because it was the site, long ago, of a grain warehouse. You can see our hotel sign above the archway.
The square is also home to an old bakers' guild hall. (guilds, by the way, were precursors to today's trade unions) Left of the red awning is a restaurant called
Pfistern, meaning "bakers." This makes sense - after all, the bakers' guild should be near the stored grain.
Every morning we walked a stone tunnel (through the old guild hall) to another square called the Weinmarkt (wine market). We ate breakfast...
...looking out at this building. I think my favorite part was the roof:
On one side of the Weinmarkt was an old apothecary. The Latin at the bottom says, in effect, "No medicine can heal a broken heart."
And, since it was a wine market, across the square you can see the wedding feast at Cana.
Not far away is the Hirshenplatz, named after the restaurant there, with its golden sign.
Hirschen means "deer."
In 1779, the German writer Goethe visited Lucerne and stayed at the Hirschrnplatz, so there's a picture of him, with a "Goethe slept here" sign.
I haven't read Goethe, but he's known as the German Shakespeare, so maybe his writing goes something like this.
Romeo:
Ich liebe dich.
Juliet:
Ich liebe dich.
Romeo:
Unsere familien sind schecht!
Juliet:
Ja!
Romeo:
Ich bin tot, Horatio!
Juliet:
Nicht das richtig spiel, dumbkopf.
(That is my pidgin German, by the way, which I used several times in Switzerland. My listeners displayed a perplexing array of symptoms, like flushing, choking, or very nearly spitting out their food.)
