Winterthur

Winterthur turned machine money into one of Europe's great private eyes for art. The industrial fortunes of the Sulzer works and their circle produced Oskar Reinhart, whose collection "Am Römerholz" — Cranach to Cézanne, hung in his villa above the town — ranks with the finest private galleries anywhere, and the city compounds it with the Kunst Museum's French moderns and a photography museum of European rank: for a mid-sized Swiss city, an implausible density of masterpieces. The Sulzer halls themselves, red-brick cathedrals of the machine age, have been reborn as quarters of lofts, stages and the Technorama science centre's cheerful explosions.

The musical pedigree is older than the factories: the Musikkollegium Winterthur traces its founding to 1629, making it one of the oldest concert institutions in Europe — Clara Schumann and Brahms appear in its annals — and its orchestra still plays the seasons in the Stadthaus, Gottfried Semper's noble hall. The Stadttheater — the venue documented in the concert record — carries the city's opera, drama and touring productions in its modern house, completing an establishment out of proportion, in the best way, to the population.

A collector's villa, a four-century concert society, factories full of art students: Winterthur is the industrious cousin who quietly turned out to own the Renoirs.