First row: Images of Basel, Switzerland.
Second row: Images of Strasbourg, France.
We were walking along the Rhine after dinner on our first night in Basel when Travelmarx 1 pointed toward the river and said to Travelmarx 2,
“Look at that kite.”
It wasn’t a kite.
It was a red square with a white cross (the Swiss flag) sign attached to the cable of a small ferry drifting slowly across the current, one of Basel’s Rhine ferries that moves without a motor. The boat is attached to a steel cable and pushed across by the force of the river itself. A few minutes later we were standing on the wooden deck of the boat with a handful of other passengers. The ferryman nudged us away from the bank, letting the Rhine do the rest. The boat angled itself into the current and began sliding sideways across the water, calm and purposeful as it has done since 1877. And the flag was gently sliding across the cable looking very much like a kite for a new set of credulous tourists.
For two Swiss francs we crossed from Kleinbasel (“Little Basel” or “Lesser Basel,” on the right bank) to Grossbasel (“Great Basel” or “Greater Basel,” the older city center on the left bank). After the complicated day it had taken just to get there, including a train strike in Northern Italy, autostrada traffic, and a frantic search for coins to use a bathroom in a Milan train station, the ferry felt like the moment the trip finally began.
Travel often starts that way. Not when the tickets are booked or the train leaves the station, but later, in some small, unexpected moment when the place begins to make sense. Or, perhaps more accurately, when you finally stop troubleshooting the logistics and start looking around.
Art anchor
The reason for our trip to Basel and Strasbourg was simple: see two cities and some world-class museums.
When Italian friends asked where we were going, two questions kept coming back. Why Basel? And why not drive? The first question was easier to answer: museums, the Rhine, and Strasbourg nearby. But that didn't seem like a satisfactory answer for them.
The second question was more revealing. From northern Italy, driving would have been possible, maybe even obvious to some people. But we wanted the train version of the trip: the swaying of the train, passing stations, mindlessly staring out the window, and the sense of having entered a different rhythm before arriving.
Basel has long been recognized as one of Europe’s important museum cities relative to its size, and the collections at the
Kunstmuseum Basel delivered exactly what we had hoped for. The museum has the kind of collection that shows you a few things you might have seen and then a whole lot you never saw before. The rooms are large and easy to wander through and the vibe is easy. We spent the better part of a day touring the Neubau and Hauptbau with lunch in between.
After the Kunstmuseum, our art explorations spread outward from the city. Just across the German border we spent a day wandering the
Vitra Design Museum campus (bus 55) in Weil am Rhein, an architectural playground anchored by Frank Gehry’s sculptural museum building. Calling our day on the Vitra campus a “museum visit” feels too narrow. It is more like a small pilgrimage through design, architecture, and furniture in a curated environment that leaves visitors freedom to wander and discover what they might discover.
We saw a wonderful exhibition at Vitra Design Museum,
Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things, full of textiles, color, craft, and material intelligence. Outside the museum, the Doshi Retreat, VitraHaus, and Oudolf Garden all added to the feeling that the campus was not just interesting but invigorating, a place where buildings, objects, and plantings kept nudging you awake.
A day after our Vitra visit, we decamped for Strasbourg. Upon arrival and after lunch at Au Petit Bois Vert (under the centuries old sycamore) then we headed to the
Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS). MAMCS is a glass-roofed building stretches along the riverbank like a cathedral for modern art, all light, volume, and polished surfaces. It took us two half days to make it through the permanent collection and special exhibitions.
A special nod goes to the Kandinsky rooms at the MAMCS in Strasbourg, anchored by Salon de musique (1931), the Bauhaus‑period canvas that captures Kandinsky’s move from depicting the visible world to building his own autonomous system of color, rhythm, and geometry. The museum arranges the space as a quiet, didactic environment: the painting’s musical analogy becomes the key to understanding abstraction as a historical rupture, and the surrounding works trace his evolution from figuration toward pure form. Within the museum’s bright, architectural calm, the room functions as a focused pause — a place where Kandinsky’s geometry resonates with the building itself and where Strasbourg positions its collection within the broader story of early 20th‑century abstraction.
During our Strasbourg stay, we backtracked south on a short train ride to Colmar to catch the
Musée Unterlinden. There the
Isenheim Altarpiece turned out to be far more powerful than we expected. We had read about it, of course, but reading about the Isenheim Altarpiece and standing in front of it are different activities. The panels were fantastical, and we couldn't believe that they were painted between 1512 – 1516. Some of the panels would not look out of place as a Tolkien illustration. The Isenheim Altarpiece was sculpted and painted by, respectively, the Germans Nikolaus Hagenauer and Matthias Grünewald, and it is Grünewald's largest work and is regarded as his masterpiece.
The rest of the museum was also a surprise: cloisters, archaeology, decorative arts, modern art, and a building that seemed to keep changing its mind about what kind of museum it wanted to be. We mean this as a compliment. At the very end you end up in the "piscine", a former public bath turned into event space.
One minor disappointment during the trip was the Museum Tinguely in Basel. We were really looking forward to visiting this and thought it might end up being the highlight of our time in Basel, but in the end, it fell a bit flat for us. After spending most of the day at the Kunstmuseum—where the quality of the works and the way they were displayed truly impressed us—we hoped the magic would continue, but it didn’t quite happen. The Tinguely machines themselves felt less refined than we expected, and it was sometimes hard to grasp how the pieces fit together conceptually. The presentation also felt a little messy, and the building didn’t help—it had the vibe of a smaller, second‑tier museum where things were somewhat thrown together. When the machines did activate, the effect was oddly underwhelming and even a bit clumsy, though perhaps that was part of Tinguely’s intent. Perhaps a return visit is in order (earlier in the day) to honestly evaluate the museum. For this trip, the real highlights of our Basel visit were the Kunstmuseum and our day at the Vitra campus—but we did genuinely enjoy the playful Tinguely fountain in town.
Also a yeah-we-know-moment: we did not make it to the
Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, which is slightly embarrassing to admit after going all the way to Basel with museums as the stated purpose. The original plan had been to fit it in. Then reality arrived, as it often does, complaining about sore feet and wanting to take it easy. In our defense, we had visited the Kunstmuseum the day before and chose Vitra over Beyeler for our last full Basel day, partly because we wanted the cross-border design-campus experience and partly because Beyeler, with its modern and contemporary art focus, felt like it would overlap more with what we had just absorbed. That was probably the right decision for this trip. It also gives us a perfectly respectable excuse to go back.
So in a way this trip became a chain of art encounters moving up and down the Upper Rhine.
Two cities, same river
Basel and Strasbourg sit only about ninety minutes apart by train, but they felt surprisingly different.
There is a slight geographical sleight of hand in calling them cities on the same river. In Basel, the Rhine runs directly through the city and is impossible to ignore and is important to how you experience the city. In Strasbourg, the Rhine flows along the eastern edge of the city, while the waterways most visitors experience are the Ill River and the canals that curl around the historic center. The Grande Île is bounded by the Ill and the Faux-Rempart canal, and at Petite France the Ill splits into several arms. These waterways are connected to the Rhine, but the experience is different: Basel presents the river as a broad, central presence; Strasbourg reveals itself through bridges, islands, quays, and smaller channels.
Basel is smaller, with a city population of roughly 180,000, and it moves at a gentler rhythm. Walking around, what stood out most was the calm: the river promenades, the tram lines gliding quietly through the streets, and the feeling that the 60% or more of the people we were seeing on the street were locals. There is wealth in Basel, certainly, and order, and a particular Swiss competence that makes even a tram crossing feel lightly choreographed. But it did not feel stiff to us.
Basel also has a way of putting its old and new selves into the same frame. Around the Marktplatz, the red sandstone Rathaus and the surrounding streets deliver the older city one expects. Then, from all sorts of vantage points, the two-stepped Roche Towers appear in the background, tall enough to make themselves part of the your photo whether you want them or not. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, they are office buildings (41 and 50 stories) on the Basel campus of Roche, the pharmaceutical and diagnostics company founded in the city in 1896 and still deeply rooted there.
At first, the towers felt slightly disconcerting, as if someone had just plopped them there. But after visiting the Tinguely Museum, we walked back toward the Mittlere Brücke beneath them. At ground level, the area was green, open, and pedestrian-friendly, not at all as severe as the towers can seem from a distance. Well-integrated in our judgment.
Strasbourg, by contrast, is larger, closer to 300,000 people in the city itself and much larger when you consider the wider metropolitan area. Yet in the center, modernity can feel surprisingly far away, at least in the form of skyscrapers and conspicuously contemporary buildings. Once you are inside the Grande Île, the old city keeps you inside its own dream of timbered houses, canals, bridges, and the cathedral rising above everything else.
That dream is not complete, of course. Stepping out of the station, the first impression was less romantic than expected: a smell of cannabis and urine, more tourists, more street life, and more visible homelessness around parks and bridges.
This is not the sentence tourism boards are waiting for, but first impressions are first impressions.
Neither impression was entirely fair. Strasbourg has its own beauty and complexity, a city shaped by centuries of shifting borders between France and Germany. The historic center, the Grande Île, is full of handsome corners, canals, timbered houses, and that great vertical shock of the cathedral. It is a city of layers, and sometimes layers are not immediately soothing.
Still, the contrast was strong enough that by the time we arrived there, we found ourselves unexpectedly missing the quieter atmosphere of Basel. This was not Strasbourg’s fault. It was partly timing, partly mood, partly weather (it turned hotter), partly the accumulated fatigue of having already seen a lot.
Travel sometimes works like that: you understand one place only when you see it against another.
On borders
Basel sits at one of the stranger geographic points in Europe, where Switzerland, France, and Germany meet.
One afternoon we took a tram partway and then walked to the
Dreiländereck, the border triangle at the northern edge of Basel. In German, Drei-Länder-Eck means “three-countries-corner,” which is satisfyingly literal. Switzerland, France, and Germany all meet here, at least symbolically, beside the Rhine.
The marker itself is a tall, modern monument on the Swiss side of the river at Westquaistrasse 75, in Basel’s port and logistics zone. Basel Tourism describes it as both the point where the three countries converge and a place where boats depart down the Rhine toward the North Sea. It is also part of the transport hub that helps supply raw materials to Switzerland, a detail that keeps the site from floating away into pure symbolism.
It was surprisingly quiet when we arrived: just us and a few other visitors standing at the edge of the river, looking at a place that is geopolitically meaningful and visually modest. There is also a small catch. The actual legal tripoint is not exactly under the monument. It lies out in the middle of the Rhine, where the Swiss, French, and German borders meet. The monument is nearby on Swiss land, making it more ceremonial marker than surveyed fact. In other words, close enough for a photo, but not quite close enough to stand in three countries at once without getting wet.
After visiting the Dreiländereck, we began walking back along the Rhine and stumbled into
Holzpark Klybeck, one of those places that feels half-planned, half-grown: containers, lights, improvised corners, food, drink, and a sense that threw us back to Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen.
There we found the
GANNET, a former lightship now grounded at Holzpark Klybeck and used as a restaurant, bar, sun deck, and alternative cultural center. It was our last night in Basel, and on a whim, we stopped for dinner.
That would have been enough. Dinner on a grounded ship, in a strange little cultural zone near the Rhine, after walking back from the place where three countries meet. But as we were finishing, a small outdoor show was starting just next to the ship:
Lunautica – Sailing to the Moon, by Variété Pavé.
The premise, as far as we could gather, involved four crew members trying to reach the moon by submarine, which is exactly the kind of explanation that makes you either walk away or immediately sit down. We climbed down from our dinner ship, took a seat, and were enthralled for the next hour.
It was part circus, part comedy, part acrobatics, part absurd nautical-lunar mission, and entirely fun. That description does not quite capture the pleasure of finding it by accident, outdoors, beside a grounded ship, at the end of a day that had already taken us to the edge of three countries.
When it was over, we walked back along the Rhine toward the Mittlere Brücke, the Middle Bridge, with a crystal-clear view of the city ahead of us. It was one of those travel evenings that feels almost suspiciously well arranged, except that no one arranged it. Spending the afternoon in Germany at Vitra, visiting the border triangle, walking along the river, eating on the ship, watching the show, and walking back into the old city on a crystal-clear night: it became, without trying, a perfect last night in Basel.
That is often how borders are in daily European life now, especially inside the Schengen zone. They exist intensely on maps, in institutions, in histories, in languages, in phone plans, and sometimes in the price of a cup of coffee. But when you cross them on a tram or a train, they may barely register.
Over a few days we crossed them repeatedly without ceremony: Switzerland to Germany for Vitra, Switzerland to France for Strasbourg, France back toward Switzerland on the way home. The Rhine flowed past all of it, linking the cities together as it has for centuries. And then of course Switzerland back to Italy.
Of course, borders are not imaginary. They matter deeply depending on who you are, what passport you carry, what you are transporting, and what history you have inherited. But for us, on this trip, they appeared mostly as a strange everyday privilege: the ability to move across national lines in search of museums, coffee, and, once or twice, a public bathroom.
Editing the trip
Halfway through our stay in Strasbourg, we had a realization that every traveler eventually has on a trip. We misjudged the rhythm of the itinerary.
By the third day we both agreed: the trip would have been better with one more day in Basel and one fewer in Strasbourg. That would have made it 4 days Basel, 4 days Strasbourg. We thought more days in Strasbourg would make sense because we'd spend a day in Colmar and maybe even another day visiting villages and the wine country. Colmar we made it to, but the villages we didn't. Part of this outcome was driven by the heat dome and high temperatures of the days we were there, and part of that was that it would require us to get on a wine/tour bus (a nonstarter for us) or rent a car, and honestly we were lazy.
It wasn’t a serious mistake. But the imbalance was clear in retrospect. Basel had felt more comfortable exploring, and we left with the sense that there was still more we genuinely wanted to do. Strasbourg also had plenty we did not see or visit, but its more frenetic tourist energy made it harder for us to summon our own tourist energy. And, honestly, one of our Strasbourg days was Whit Monday. Never heard of it? Neither had we. The holiday is important there and almost everything was closed. So instead of trying to see more, we took the opportunity to circumnavigate the city on foot, follow the banks of the Ill River, drink coffee, and relax. Which, in itself, turned out to be very good day.
There is always a little fiction in an itinerary. You imagine your future self as alert, efficient, receptive, and lightly caffeinated. You picture the day unfolding in clean segments: museum, walk, lunch, second museum, river stroll, excellent dinner, early night. Then the real day arrives with weather, tired feet, late trains, urgent bathroom breaks, flagging energy, and the unexpected need to sit somewhere for twenty minutes and say nothing.
Travel planning is really a first attempt at editing in advance. The final edit happens later.
This is one of the reasons we like writing these posts after the fact. The blog becomes a second itinerary; one we can finally get right because it no longer must be useful in real time. We can cut the extra day, keep the ferry, move the coffee recommendation earlier, and pretend there was a plan all along.
Coffee threads
Among the museums, trains, borders, and city walks, the most memorable thread turned out to be coffee.
Early in the trip we discovered the cafés in Basel called BRÜ and BRÜ₂. When a barista at these cafés learned we would be visiting Strasbourg, he immediately created a short list of coffee places we should try. One of them was Dude Café.
A few days later, in Strasbourg, we found ourselves at Dude, drinking coffee and eating an improbably good cheesecake (Basque style). There are many ways to evaluate a city, none of them scientific. Architecture matters. Public transport matters. Museums matter. But a good café recommendation from someone who clearly cares about coffee has a way of making a city feel briefly more legible.
It is also pleasingly old-fashioned. In an age when we can ask apps, maps, reviews, rankings, forums, and artificial assistants for recommendations, a spoken/written suggestion from one human to another still carries a different weight. Especially when it leads to cheesecake.
Back through Basel
On the way back to Bergamo, we passed through Basel one more time. Our train connection gave us two hours, just enough time to walk back into the city for a final coffee.
Naturally, we returned to BRÜ₂ (closest to the station), the café where the barista had given us the Strasbourg list.
When we walked in, he looked up and said something that surprised us. “Oh, you went to Dude.”
Apparently, the people there had mentioned that two visitors from Basel had stopped in. Somehow the small network of baristas had connected the dots before we had even returned to the city.
It was a tiny moment, but it captured something about the trip. We had moved between Switzerland, France, and Germany, crossed the Rhine by ferry, spent days in museums, and tried to understand two cities only ninety minutes apart. But what remained at the end were small threads like this: a recommendation passed across a coffee counter, a café discovered in another city, and a brief conversation that closed the loop.
At the beginning, we mistook the ferry cable for a kite. By the end, the mistake felt useful. The trip had been held together by lines we did not always see at first: across the river, across borders, between museums, between cafés.
And like that little ferry on the Rhine, we were not simply moving ourselves through the trip. We were also being pushed along by the current, moved a little by forces we did not control, and carried from one bank to another.
Not a kite, exactly. More a small system of tethers and currents, pulling and pushing the story into shape.
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