Zurich Old Town Walking Tour

Zurich is a banking city with a radical past, and the two are closer together than they look. In 1519 Huldrych Zwingli took the pulpit at the Grossmunster and began preaching straight through the Gospel of Matthew instead of the assigned readings. Within a few years the images were out of the churches, the organ was dismantled, and the Swiss Reformation had a second centre independent of Luther. The Grossmunster interior is still startlingly bare. Across the river, the Fraumunster keeps five windows made by Marc Chagall in 1970, when he was in his eighties. They are the reason most visitors come, and photography inside is prohibited. The Lindenhof, a flat terrace above the river, was a Roman customs post and then an imperial palace; nothing of either survives above ground, but the view over the rooftops explains why anyone built there. And in 1916, in a small bar on Spiegelgasse, a group of wartime refugees started an evening of nonsense poetry and called it Dada. Lenin was living four doors up the same street at the time. Around 2.5 km, level except for the short climb to the Lindenhof.