Over the border and into the Alps' front garden. Bern is a city on a bend of a green river, arcaded streets, fountains on every corner with painted figures standing on them, and above it all the Münster tower, the tallest in Switzerland. I came for one thing and stayed for three.

The one thing was the Last Judgement over the cathedral's main door: more than two hundred figures, carved by Erhart Küng at the end of the fifteenth century, the saved filing off to the left and the damned being dragged off to the right with considerable enthusiasm. When the Reformation's image-breakers went through Bern in 1528 they cleared the cathedral of nearly everything, and somehow this survived. Standing under it for an hour with a long lens is the closest I have come to reading a medieval book.

Two hundred faces, one Judgement, and a city that decided it was worth keeping.

The other two were a fountain and a building. The Moses fountain on the Münsterplatz, gilded tablets held out like a warning, paint renewed and re-renewed for five centuries. And the Federal Palace, where Helvetia and her companions keep watch over the parliament in stone allegory that nobody walking past ever looks up at. Both are below, along with the film on the Last Judgement.