Basel, in Switzerland, is an Amazing City to Visit

It is early morning and the streets aren't busy with cars, but with trams that ring their bells at every stop and so tell us exactly the minutes passing. We're in Basel, a city in the North of Switzerland, on the boarder with France and Germany. The railroad station looks a lot like the German ones, which isn't a surprise because the boarder is only a couple of miles away. The city is immersed in green, which divides the "city", if we may call it that, from the residential areas with big impressive houses and gardens that are very well looked after.

Basel becomes the capital of the Swiss art scene when it hosts the 'Art Basel,' one of the most important art fairs and where thousands of people from all over the world come and visit. The historic city center is very calm, maybe almost boring, and it seems like it tries to be German even if its own nationality is continuously being marked by the hanging Swiss flags. I believe that, to better understand the Swiss, it's best to analyze the residential areas and so I went to have a look in one of the districts that surround the city. Everything seems exaggeratedly calm, the only noises one can hear are the ones of the birds that break the silence that echoes through the houses of the area. Every once and a while there's a child playing in the green area of the district. The few pedestrians get suspicious when they see me crossing the street with my friend.

At one point, amidst all the silence, pops up an elderly woman, very well dressed with her dress and bag. My friend, a university teacher in Rome, for a split second breaks this non-written "silence-rule" and greets her in Italian: "Buon giorno!" Even if she didn't know her, the gentle elderly woman, remaining quite puzzled, very politely answers in Italian, but, once she got back in her house, she continues to look at us from behind the window and has an expression on her face as if she were the Swiss Miss Marple. The streets all look the same, the only differences are the buildings: on one side we find the terraced houses and on the other buildings that hold many small apartments; the apartments that welcome the inhabitants of Basel. I find myself in a city that breaths richness and maybe hides some bank secret in the numerous subsidiaries in the city centre. During Easter it's invaded by chocolate bunnies and the shop-windows offer hundreds of different sized animals in all kinds of ingredients. In 2006, while I was living in Germany, I could breathe the air of the future international football championships: Hannover was covered with publicity of the international event, while now in Basel, which will be one of the cities of this year's European championship, nothing seems to have been activated yet, except for a few articles in the local newspaper.

From football to culture: in the city and in its surroundings there are two important cultural centers: the Beyeler Foundation and the Vitra Design Museum on German soil but only ten minutes away by car. The Foundation is much more than a museum: opened in 1997, it is an architectural beauty of one of Italy's most famous architects: Renzo Piano. A place where past and present comes together through the exhibition rooms surrounded by a magnificent garden. On the inside of the permanent space one can find works of Paul Czanne, Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and many others. The most important part is the temporary exhibition room where there are important exhibitions on international level. The Design Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein, was designed by another important master of architecture: Frank Gehry. It is one of the most important industrial design museums; it hosts temporary architecture, design and interior design exhibitions and manifestations. The architectural park has become such in 1989 thank to the transformation of the business area. It is one of those places you have to see when you're in the area because works of Frank Gehry, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Nicolas Grimshaw, Alvaro Siza and Tadao Ando can be found here.

Hence, Basel encloses art, architecture, design and maybe a bit of perfection that, to me, it makes it look a bit melancholic, even if by night I still dream of those trams punctual to the second, embodying that stereotypical Swiss spirit.