Solothurn

Solothurn is the number eleven made municipal. The town joined the Confederation as its eleventh canton, and then made a cosmology of it: eleven churches and chapels, eleven fountains, eleven towers, the cathedral of St Ursus with its eleven altars and eleven bells, reached by flights of eleven steps — and in the Zytglogge square a clock face that runs to eleven, no twelve required. Around the numerology stands the finest Baroque town in Switzerland, built when the French kings' ambassadors resided here for two and a half centuries and Paris fashion met Swiss stone: Italianate churches, French mansions, patrician calm inside intact walls, with the Weissenstein ridge of the Jura as backdrop.

The town's cultural calendar carries national weight — the Solothurn Film Days open the Swiss cinema year, the Literature Days follow — and its summers belong to music: Classic Openair Solothurn stages opera and concert nights on the St.-Ursen-Bastion, the bastion terrace above the moat, with the Rythalle, the converted riding hall by the old arsenal, as its indoor partner. Festival, bastion and hall are all documented in the concert record — more densely, indeed, than any other Swiss address in it, the archive's own Swiss home stage. Eleven of everything, ambassadors' architecture, arias on the ramparts: Solothurn is proof that a small town can keep count of its blessings — precisely.