Old Friends

“Hey mom, did you know there some famous old guys coming to the Saint Jakob’s stadium?” my daughter said, in passing.
“Oh who?” I replied, unable to muster any interest. Her idea of famous seldom jibes with mine.
“Oh, I don’t know, I can never remember his name. Gar, Gar, I can't remember. Anyway, he's an old guy and he's coming to Basel. I know, you like him. His name's Gar-somebody.”
“Garfunkel?”
“Yeah, I think that's him.”
“Simon and Garfunkel?”
“Yeah, both of them.”
“Geez! to Basel?” My enthusiasm level started to sky rocket.
“You see. I told you it was somebody you’d like.”
“You don’t like Paul Simon? Rhythm of the Saints?”
“Diamonds on the Soles of her Feet,” her dad added.
“Daaa-ad, That’s soles of her shoes.”
“Whatever.”
“Yeah mom, you know, lots of old famous people come to Basel.”
“They do?”
“Yeah mom, you don't pay attention.”
“Well maybe not, but Simon and Garfunkel aren't old guys.”
“Sure they are.”
“Whaddaya mean old? When was Sounds of Silence?” I looked at her dad. “1966-67? That's not ol....”
“Mom, that's like more than thirty-five years ago.”
“Yeah so?”
“That's old mom.”
Simon and Garfunkel. That took me back, all the way to 1966 and Toronto. I wanted to see Peter, Paul and Mary in concert. “Waste of money,” my father pronounced.
“It’s my money,” I said, confusing insistence with insolence. Two years later and living on my own, I saw Donovan at the University of Toronto’s Varsity Stadium. Add six more years, and it was Neil Diamond at the Maple Leaf Gardens, packed with women in their twenties and thirties. They held their Bic® lighters aloft and swooned when Diamond crooned Solitary Man, a tune that only ever made it big in Toronto. Next on the venue, Bob Dylan, front row seats but behind a newly erected pillar for lighting (about which my new squeeze was furious).
“I still remember that,” he says, twenty-five years later. “And the performance was god awful. We were going to walk out. Remember?”
I do. One never really forgets the extremes. Dylan was in his neo-Christian era backed by a five-woman line-up of gospel singers. Toronto audiences, notoriously difficult to please, barely clapped before stumbling out of Massey Hall, dumbfounded.
“Did we actually pay to see that?” my husband asks, still ticked off even now.
“I can’t believe we saw the whole thing,” I say, paraphrasing the tag line to a sixties Alka Seltzer commercial.
Thus it was, undaunted, more than two decades after Dylan we girded our loins and set off on our bikes to Basel. There we mixed easily with the other cyclists, pedestrians and tram takers. (No traffic jams for the sensible Swiss.) Unfettered by metal detectors and body searches, the fans, aged anywhere from a bare-midriffed sixteen to a support-hosed sixty-six, staked out a comfortable territory on the plastic mesh-protected playing field with their collapsible chairs, picnic blankets and beach towels. Some munched Bratwurst, others drank beer and a few, a very few it seemed, smoked a joint. If you had the good fortune to find yourself by a pot smoker and inhaled deeply, well who knew? Maybe the experience would be herbally enhanced.
Eight thirty arrived—and left. By 8:35 the punctual Swiss got a trifle testy in a low-key Basel sort of way. Up flashed the photographs of old friends, Simon and his pal Art from childhood to, dare I say it? old age….older age, oldish age? Buddies for more than fifty years, the slightly paunchy duo appeared and sang Old Friends—a gentle nostalgic start. I looked about me. Were there many ‘old guys’ among us? Not really, if I take the starting point of my own age. Every song an anthem, the audience accompanied the performers by singing the still pertinent lyrics. Clearly Simon writes from his heart while Art sings from his soul.
By way of introduction, Simon said he and Garfunkel used to imitate the Everly Brothers and then they appeared, complete with Hollywood hair. Three tunes later, the pace picked up. With trepidation I awaited my daughter’s early warning signs of a body being transported aloft to the area near the stage. “You have to be on the alert for that,” she counselled. “And, if you’re close to the stage you’ve got to be physically fit owing to all the push and shove.
“The people in the mid-section will sway to the music,” she said, “and if the mood is right you’ll go into a trance.” They did, I didn’t.
“Be ready to duck, lift or get smashed in the face,” she cautioned. I began to look more and more forward to the evening. She hadn’t finished There was more fun to come. Apparently, with any luck the hoisted spectator would ultimately be tossed toward a group of youths buff as broncos—always better than into a gaggle of girls, known to step back at the last moment and not carry their load. There was none of that. Perhaps no one trusted his body to the old fogies’ weak wrists and crumbling bones.
Simon was twenty-one when he wrote one song, he’s sixty-two now but he won’t be for long. Had they aged? Of course. Could they still sing? You bet.

Musée du papier peint

“Wallpaper museum?!” my friend snorted, when I told her I planned to visit the Musée du papier peint.
Crestfallen, I said, “That bad?”
“Well no, I’ve heard it’s quite good, actually. It’s just that if you tell anyone you want to go to a wallpaper museum they snort derisively.”
Wallpaper has been made in Rixheim, France since 1797, and by Zuber and Cie, from 1802 to 1982. The Musée du papier peint housed in the old Zuber and Cie factory was founded in 1983.
Zuber et Cie, still the crème de la crème of wallpaper makers, is especially known for their scenic wall panels. At one time, the company shipped half of its product to the U.S.A. where many of their hand blocked panels still decorate famous residences across America including, whether Dubya realizes it or not, the Blue Room of the White House.
A labour intensive product, Zuber’s wallpapers require the services of many skilled of craftsmen (colourists, artists, printers, wood carvers)—thus once providing a livelihood for most of Rixheim’s townspeople until the process became industrialized. On display are numerous Rube Goldberg-like contraptions, even one from New Brunswick, New Jersey. One of these machines could produce in a single day, what it previously took four years to make; not however, the panoramic scenes which continue to be manufactured by hand and can require more than fifteen hundred blocks and over two hundred colours.
Apparently, owning a Zuber scene is akin to owning a famous painting. The whole painstaking process starts with the colourist, who hand mixes chalk with mineral, vegetable or chemical pigment. Four men, who are not allowed to talk during the process, apply the background colours with wide brushes. Once the paper has dried, right-handed printers, the blocks aren’t designed to accommodate southpaws, press the paint-laden fruit-wood blocks on precisely designated spots which are later retouched by an artist’s hand.
During the last war, the occupying German forces used many of the original, two-century-old wooden blocks, (since declared by the French government as historical monuments) for firewood. Those blocks that remain are still being used today. The museum’s entrance is located in a secluded courtyard just off the business area of Rixheim.
Musée du papier peint
La Commanderie, 28 rue Zuber
B.P. 41
F-68171 Rixheim
Tel. ++33 389 64 24 56
Fax ++33 389 54 33 06
E-mail: musee.papier.peint@wanadoo.fr
http://www.museepapierpeint.org
Opening hours (call for a guided tour): Daily (except Tuesday) 10-12 a.m. / 2-6 p.m.

History and Hagiography

The Historisches Museum Basel houses a treasury of world renown. Once a church, now a museum, it is located directly opposite the Barfüsser tram stop. Step into that unassuming building (ignore the drab area on the left passing for a coffee shop) and you experience a quiet uncluttered calm that belies the importance of the treasury discreetly exhibited within. Churches have been endowed with jewel-encrusted, gold and silver objects since the late 8th century. Jewels can be readily sold; gold and silver are easily reworked into coin or ingots to pay for wars, so many medieval treasuries have disappeared. So few medieval treasuries exist in Europe today that scholars can only learn about what once was through written inventories. The Basel Cathedral Treasury was assembled over five centuries from 1019 to 1529 when the Protestant Reformation became established in Basel. It is rare because it has survived almost intact, nine hundred years. Over half of the original pieces are in the Historisches Museum. Five years ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, assembled almost the complete treasury for a major exhibition. It borrowed missing pieces from museums in Amsterdam, Berlin, London, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and Zurich.
When the earthquake of 1356 toppled portions of the cathedral’s towers into the Rhine below, its treasury remained snug and undamaged within. It has outlived two eras destructive to Catholic religious objects and icons, the Protestant Reformation and iconoclasm, but not the division of Basel into Basel City and Basel Land. One item that fell victim to this division was the gilded silver Reliquary Bust of Saint Ursula (1300–1320). Basel Land being the poorer of the two regions sold part of its treasury. A hundred years later, the bust, purchased with donations from the people of Basel, was recovered from the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Its history began a half-century before its creation. In 1254, the Cologne Cathedral gave the Basel Cathedral a skull and two arm bones, among other relics of several thousand martyred virgins, or so the story goes.
There is no dearth of Ursula legends, all of Monty Pythonesque proportions. Details and dates vary. Essentially, Ursula was doomed to marry a heathen. She managed to postpone her wedding for three years, to make a pilgrimage to Rome to devote (albeit temporarily) her virginity to Christ. The delay would give her fiancé sufficient time to convert to Christianity, be baptized and become a devout practising Christian.
Ursula set sail from Britain with eleven thousand maidens in tow. Blown to the mouth of the Rhine, she and the damsels sailed up the river to Cologne where an angel foretold Ursula’s demise as a martyr. Unfazed, Ursula continued up the Rhine to Basel where she and all 11,000 chaste companions disembarked to continue their journey through the Alps to Rome, on foot. Along the way, Ursula managed to convert these ingénues to Christianity.
In Rome, Ursula met a certain Pope Cyriacus who was supposed to accompany her safely home but backed out. In the meantime, word reached the ruling Huns in Cologne that Ursula and her troop would be passing through. Only interested in women for pleasure according to one Ursuline Internet site, they eagerly awaited Ursula’s arrival.
Writers are always cautioned not to use hackneyed phrases like the one I am about to use but I can think of none more apt. Perhaps the expression ‘a fate worse than death’ originated with Ursula’s narrative because in Cologne, the maidens exchanged their heads for their maidenheads.
Surveying thousands of beheaded corpses, Ursula was comforted and entreated by the Top Hun to take his bloodied hand in marriage. Alas, already betrothed to a Christian, Ursula could not be tempted by the heathen Hun’s proposal and also perished. To add insult to ignominy, forty years ago, Pope Paul VI struck Ursula from the saints’ registry.
Centuries later, unsullied by time and travel, the Reliquary bust of Saint Ursula smirks serenely in the Historisches Museum Basel.
If your German isn’t up to scratch and you are unable to decipher the explanations beside each treasury exhibit, there’s an excellent film on the ground floor you can watch in English or French.
Another section of the museum houses bits of a mural rescued from the interior of the Prediger Church’s cemetery wall. These fragments of the Totentanz (Dance of Death) are all that remain of a two-metre high, sixty-metre long mural, warning the populace of Basel (still smarting from the earthquake and the Black Death) to live a virtuous if not exemplary life because Death could strike before its victim received last rites.
Once a popular theme in Europe, many a Totentanz was lost when Europe was bombed in World War II. Basel’s centuries old wall fell before the war; victim to urban expansion, it came crashing down in 1805. There’s no record of its commission but it is thought that the Totentanz was painted around 1430. The mural, protected from the elements by a cantilevered roof, depicted several levels of medieval society from a duke and his duchess, to a count, a knight and so on down to a crippled beggar. Each one, caught unawares, was made to dance with a skeleton—death. The message was clear; irrespective of one’s social standing, whether powerful or rich, death claims us all and in death we are all equal. The wall no longer stands but its message still does.
Also on display are some of Basel’s guild treasures, tapestries, ecclesiastical art and furniture. Not to be missed are the treasures hidden beneath the former church.
Kinderleben in Basel displays objects illustrating how (mostly privileged) children lived in Basel between the 18th and 20th century. There is also a coin section, several exquisite rooms from ancient demolished houses in Basel, some weaponry and much more.
If I were to identify a single negative point about the museum, it is that almost all the explanations are in German. Granted, Basel is a predominantly German speaking city and we all need to make an effort to learn the language, but at the same time, like it or not, it’s an international city. The museum would attract more visitors from the city and the region if the directors were to make information more accessible by having it in French and English; nevertheless, it’s well worth a visit.

HISTORISCHES MUSEUM BASEL: Barfüsserplatz
Closed Tuesdays, open Mon, Wed - Sun 10 - 17 hours
T +41 (0)61 205 86 00, http://www.hmb.ch/de.html
(If I haven’t convinced anyone to buy a Museumspass yet, I would like to add that I lost mine and it was replaced within two days. Don’t leave home without it.)

Toten Tanz

Anyone who believes beauty is skin deep hasn’t visited the Anatomicsches Museum in Basel.
I visited it twice, not that once would not have sufficed but the first time my camera was on the blink. My eldest daughter, who starts medical school this month, thought the museum was ‘really cool’. Long finished his medical studies, my husband accompanied me for a second round. In general, he was impressed with the displays and in particular, the amazing amount of patience required for the preparation of each specimen.
No longer a practising nurse, I lean more toward the metaphysical these days and can’t help wondering if the two-legged, two-headed skeleton counts as one person with one soul or two persons with a soul each?
Naturally, to visit the museum, one needn’t be accompanied by anyone with the slightest medical interest—a couple of ghoulish teens would do. Years ago, when all the specimens were housed in heavy wood-framed, glass cases and the museum was open only on Sundays, a friend of mine visited it after church with her two children. When I asked if they went once or many times, she said, “I don’t recall. It may have been only once but it seemed like more. I know we came away feeling faintly sick and green at the gills but fascinated never-the-less.”
Now housed in modern glass casings, there’s no need to wait for a Sunday to view the recently repickled, century-old specimens. Opening hours are Monday through Friday from 1400 to 1700 hours. Until May of this year, the spine is featured. Worth playing with is a neat, hands-on model that illustrates better than any explanation, how improper lifting strains the spine. Furthermore, you can compare the fist-sized human heart to that of an elephant or a mouse and marvel that such a small muscle pumps 24/7 for seven plus decades (if you’re lucky and look after it). You can also examine a hip implant, a fracture repair and a knee replacement, and consider how many people are not in wheelchairs but still mobile owing to advances in medical science.
If you can shake off the feeling that you are walking among the dead, a visit to the Anatomisches Museum may prove more interesting than you first thought.

ANATOMISCHES MUSEUM
 der Universität Basel

Pestalozzistrasse 20

CH - 4056 Basel

Museum-Anatomie@unibas.ch

Jailhouse Blues

Once upon a time, not so long ago (1835-1995) in Basel’s Old Town, there existed a prison—which had, long, long ago (1070) been an Augustinian monastery. End of fairy tale. Leaving a goal to sit in the heart of Basel on prime real estate did not make good business sense, thus a plan was proposed to convert the property into ritzy apartments. Fortunately for the citizens of Basel and its museum goers, the task proved too difficult to execute, so instead of becoming a posh place for the few, the prison became the largest musical instrument museum in Switzerland.
Along with its collection of Basel Fastnacht fifes and drums, the museum is home to about 3,000 European musical instruments (dating from the 16th to the 20th century) 600 of which are on view. The rest are in storage but accessible to music students.
Financed by private donations, the outer shell of the prison has been retained as have the prison cells and the original herringbone pattern parquet, restored to a rich lustre. The cells’ black walls and four-metre high ceilings provide the perfect décor for the glass cases of drums, stringed and wind instruments. At the foot of each cell is a touch-sensitive flat screen, placed at a height convenient for both adults and children alike; where, in three languages, you can read the history of each instrument and hear it played either alone or in a musical composition.
Outside the cells are centuries-old keyboard instruments of varying construction. One cell provides a hands-on display of piano and organ works. Finally, for those of a more lugubrious bent, there remains one untouched, vacated goal cell.
What struck me was that each instrument must have its own untold tale of a journey through the hands of craftsmen and musicians, across lands and into the care of people who sheltered or neglected them through decades of war, famine and pestilence until they landed, sometimes a century or four later in the hands of restorers, who then repaired, catalogued and mounted them in black display cases beside a little white number.
One of the more fascinating instruments on display is the Serpent. Once described as unlovely and bullocky, it is, as the name suggests, an S-shaped instrument, with curves encompassing up to 2.5 metres of hollow wooden tubing. Originally, Serpents were made from a block of walnut wood, the size of the finished instrument. The block was split down the middle, then both halves were hollowed out like a dugout canoe in the form of an ‘s’ then glued together. The final s-shape was hued from this reassembled block and covered with leather. Apparently, Serpents made this way are still more desirable than those made from high tech materials like fibreglass and owing to advances in carpentry, and probably glue too, are much easier to make than they once were.
How Serpents came into being isn’t known exactly, only that a Frenchman, Canon Edmé Guillau was (forgive me) instrumental in its invention and design. The Serpent was probably built by an instrument maker to the Canon’s specifications.
Prior to the 16th century, most music was written for the church and performed, without accompaniment, by the pure human voice (plainsong). Because low pitched notes sung by male voices lack volume, the Serpent was developed to fill that gap, thus it slithered its way into the church in 1590 and accompanied the male voice for the next 200 years.
Not to be outdone by the French, the English also developed their own Serpent, but constructed it from curved overlapping conical sections and bound it with varnished cloth strips or covered it with a leather sheath. Either way, it needed to be re-enforced with metal bands making it more durable, if less airtight than the French instrument. Its durability proved rather useful to the military, in turbulent 18th century Europe, because it could be played during marches, in battle and even on horseback.
From military bands to rural churches not possessing organs, the Serpent slid into the orchestra pit, until improvements in instrument design lead to its replacement by louder brass instruments like the tuba. This is not to say that you no longer hear the Serpent being played—just that you are not aware of it. Used in film sound tracks and commercials, it is also making a comeback with some musicians and especially in recreations of historic music recorded on the original instruments.
If you’d like to hear how a Serpent sounds you could try this link: http://www.oddmusic.com/clips/serpent.mp3 or better yet, hop on tram number 3 to the Musikakademie and visit the Music Museum in Basel.
Wheelchair accessible, the museum is closed Mondays, open: Tues, Wed, Fri 14-19h; Thu 14-20 and Sundays 11-16h. Im Lohnhof 9, Basel
Tel.: +41 61 205 86 00, 
Fax: +41 61 205 86 01, 
historisches.museum@bs.ch
www.musikmuseum.ch
Happy Day: 1st Sunday in the month free admission.
Happy Hour: Tue, Wed, Fri 18 - 19 h; Thu 19 - 20 h free admission. Different prices apply for some special exhibitions. Free entry with the Oberrheinischen Museumspass or the Schweizer Museumspass
Guided tours : 1st Thursday of the month

If my description of the Serpent has intrigued you but you balk at the measly entrance fee, let me plug the Museumspass once more. With entry to 150 museums in three countries, at CHF 94 for one adult and five children under the age of sixteen or CHF 166 for two adults and the same number of kids, it’s a steal. Buy it. You won’t regret it. Trust me.

Haut Koenigsbourg*

The Rhine Valley is studded with castles, most in ruins some restored. Haut Koenigsbourg perches on a ledge, 755 metres high at the junction of former wheat, wine, salt and silver routes. The more than nine-centuries-old former Austrian fortress has housed princes, emperors, lords, dukes, bishops, counts, knights, kings and kaisers.
Within its on average four-metre-thick walls, there have been workshops, a forge, a mill, a 190-foot deep well, a stable, cowshed, draw bridges and a walled medieval garden. Furnished with 12th to 17th century furniture, the baronial apartments, kitchen, chapel, ceremonial hall and an armoury housing some medieval and Renaissance weaponry can be viewed.
I liked the armoury best owing to my morbid fascination with man’s continuing need to slaughter his fellow man. On display were a number of early and late halberds, a far cry from today’s anonymous landmines and cluster bombs. The halberd, a combination spear and battle-axe developed by the Swiss, could, owing to its sheer weight, slice through armour. Since that wasn’t always enough to down one’s opponent, the later modified halberds were designed to pierce a man’s gut and then with a little twist and a pull, effectively disembowel him before moving on to the next ‘enemy combatant’.
Also on display are a few suits of armour. Made to measure, they were a luxury item then as now and weighed twenty to forty kilograms—a heavy load considering that men were smaller in stature than today’s elite warriors, who often carry considerably heavier loads while wearing modern day steel, titanium, ceramic or polyethylene re-inforced flak jackets based on their forerunner, plate armour.
I overheard one guide explain that an armoured knight always lifted his visor with the right hand, a gesture which was the precursor of Dubya’s sometimes snappy salute and another example of ‘old Europe’s’ influence in the New World.
Owing to wars and sieges, the castle, thought to have been built about 1114, has changed hands frequently. It was burned in 1462, rebuilt in 1479, then burned again and left in ruins for several centuries. Today’s tourist has Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to thank for its restoration in the early 1900s. Essentially, it was his attempt to create good public relations with the Alsace, then recently annexed to Germany. To restore the castle to its medieval glory, the Kaiser hired Bodo Ebhardt, an architect familiar with medieval architecture.
On top of the castle, the visitor has a terrific, panoramic view of the plain of Alsace, and on the way down there is a gallery of photographs showing the ruins before and after the restoration.
In 1919, the castle was classified as a National Palace and given back to France according to a provision in the Treaty of Versailles. During World War II, it was used to house collections from museums in Colmar and Strasbourg. In 1944, American troops occupied the castle until Germany surrendered Colmar.
There is plenty of free parking on the road at the foot of the castle including handicapped person’s parking but wheelchair access is difficult considering both the steep road and forest pathway to the castle. According to the website, people possessing an invalid card are admitted for free but anyone in a wheelchair needs to be accompanied. There are three hundred steps of different heights within the castle thus the armoury and apartments are inaccessible to wheelchairs. The grounds outside the castle are wheelchair accessible and although not seen from the top of the castle, the view, nevertheless, is fantastic.
Tours are conducted in French, English and German by well-informed and enthusiastic guides. Ninety-minute long, multi-lingual audio guides can be rented for an additional four euros. There is a souvenir shop and a bookstore, selling mostly French books, inside the restaurant on site. The castle’s only washrooms accessible via a stairway are also in the restaurant.
Located in Orschwiller some twenty kilometres north of Colmar, the castle is open in November, December, January and February from 9:45 to 12:00 and then from 13:00 to 17:00. In March and October it is open from 9:45 to 17:00. In April, May and September, it is open from 9:30 to 17:30 and in June, July and August from 9:30 to 18:30. The castle is closed the first of January and May and on December 25th. The Museumspass is not accepted; entry costs €7.50 (less for students and groups).
www.monum.fr (in English and French)
e-mail: haut-koenigsbourg@monum.fr
Tel: 33 (0)3 88 82 50 60
Fax: 33 (0)3 88 82 50 61

Top Gear


A black and white blow-up of Mother Schlumpf—knitting— graces the entrance to the Automobile Museum in Mulhouse. It was to honour her that the Schlumpf brothers founded a car museum and bankrupted their business in the process.
Fritz and Hans Schlumpf were autocratic Swiss wool industrialists, who collected Bugattis like little boys collect dinky toys. How did the Schlumpfs amass enough riches to furnish their private museum with Bugattis, Ferraris, Mercedes Benz, Maseratis and Porsches— to name but a few?
One of the ways Hans, a former banker, siphoned off funds from the business, was to pay the mill workers poorly, dock fifteen minutes off their pay if they were late or signed out a minute or two early and not pay bonuses or increments.
The brothers set about refurbishing their cars by hiring and swearing to secrecy saddlers, body workers and mechanics. These employees worked in a sealed off a portion of the mill with direct access to the railway tracks. It was in this mill building that Fritz displayed the restored cars to private and select viewers. All went well for a few years with Fritz buying whole lots of cars, often paying much beyond the market price. When in the late sixties the textile industry began to move to Asia, the Schlumpfs’ enterprise started to falter. With strikes in the offing, the brothers laid off employees and sold part of the business. Rumours of their secret car collection persisted to circulate until 1977 when some union workers broke into the museum. Amazed and enraged by their discovery, they destroyed the shell of one not yet refurbished car, then occupied the museum and ran it for two years.
Meanwhile, unlike Robert Maxwell (who jumped ship) or Kenneth Lay (who died ‘prematurely’) Hans and Fritz, both survivors, ducked their debts by beating a hasty retreat to Basel, where they lived in self exile (and some comfort) in the Drei Koenige Hotel.
After much political wrangling, the French state did not sell or disperse the Schlumpf collection to other museums and private collectors all over the world but ultimately classified the collection as a historic monument. Thereafter, private individuals and public authorities purchased the land, the collection and the buildings that housed it. They transformed the Schlumpf collection into a world class museum that houses the biggest and finest collection of vintage cars in the world. Renovated, refurbished and reopened in March 2000, the museum still maintains the character of the original private museum with its brick walkway, white gravel aisles and Pont Alexandre III lamp posts. There’s also a long hall stuffed with Bugatti racing cars and filled with the appropriate sound effects of cheering crowds and racing cars.
Off in one corner (I missed it, but my husband said it was terrific) are two robots and a film showing how cars are assembled today. Sometime during your visit, you may want to squeeze into an old racing car to have your photograph taken, or if need be, you can take a spin in a rotating Peugeot—cheaper than a fair ride and more sick-making too, judging by the wobbly-kneed green-gilled teenagers I saw topple out.
If you think Bugattis are world famous Italian racing cars, think again. Although invented by Milan-born Ettore Bugatti, they were and still are manufactured in the Alsacian town of Molsheim. If you’ve seen the billboards advertising the Bugatti Veyron Exhibition and been tempted to ogle the car —touted as the most powerful in the world and the machine Jeremy Clarkson is itching to drive —go. You still have until November 5, 2006.
Clearly not a ‘car person’ I’ve focussed more on the Schlumpfs’ story than their museum in this article, but I can agree with the Guide Vert Michelin rating of three stars; the exhibition really is worth the trip.
Open every day of the year except Christmas and New Year’s day, the Musée National de l’Automobile, Collection Schlumpf accepts the Museumspass but does charge a little extra. An audio guide, in six languages, comes with the entrance fee and there’s a restaurant and a cafeteria on site.
192 avenue de Colmar
Mulhouse, France
Tel: +33 (0)389332323.
www:collection-schlumpf.com