Basel
— a city the river carries through.
Not only on a wall.
“The Swiss city on the Rhine, where Germany and France meet at the trinational corner. Red sandstone Münster on the hill above the river, narrow medieval lanes, and a long tradition of summer swimming: Baslers drift down the Rhine on warm afternoons with their clothes sealed inside a Wickelfisch. Art Basel runs in June. Erasmus is buried in the cathedral.
Basel, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Basel sits at the northwestern corner of Switzerland on a bend of the Rhine, where the Swiss, German, and French borders meet at the Dreiländereck. The city is the third-largest in the country, with a population of about 177,000 in the canton and roughly 540,000 across the trinational metropolitan area. The Old Town climbs the south bank above the river; Kleinbasel lies on the north. Two Roman-era settlements, Augusta Raurica and Basilia, mark the city's two-thousand-year history along this stretch of the Rhine.
The Münster cathedral on the Pfalz terrace is built of red Vosges sandstone, begun in the late twelfth century and completed in stages through the fifteenth. Twin spires rise above the river bend. The tomb of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who died in Basel in July 1536, lies inside the north aisle. The terrace itself looks east across the Rhine to the lower city. Surrounding buildings on the Münsterplatz, including the Bischofshof and the old chapter house, share the same warm sandstone the river carried down from the Vosges mountains across the French border.
The Rhine flows through Basel at about a thousand cubic metres per second, cold enough to swim comfortably only from late June into September. Locals enter the water upstream of the Mittlere Brücke and drift down with their clothes and phones sealed inside a Wickelfisch, the bright waterproof swim bag invented here in the 1990s. Designated exit ladders are spaced along both banks. The current is strong and the Rhine police post daily temperature and flow notices. The Münster terrace overlooks the busiest swim section in the early evening.