Zurich: 577 Days, Jonas, and the Best Chocolate I Have Ever Eaten

Zurich is one of the wealthiest cities in the world by most measures and one of the most consistently ranked for quality of life, both facts that are connected and that reflect a specific Swiss history. Switzerland’s neutrality in both World Wars, maintained through a combination of diplomatic dexterity, geographic defensibility, and a degree of economic accommodation of both sides that historians have found easier to document than to defend, meant that Zurich was not bombed, not occupied, not restructured under post-war reconstruction programmes. The buildings that were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are still there, the cobbled streets of the Altstadt running to the same geometry as they did a hundred and fifty years ago, the Grossmünster and Fraumünster churches facing each other across the Limmat river with the settled self-assurance of buildings that have not had to worry about being demolished. What Switzerland did with the money that passed through it during and after the wars, and how it continues to manage the banking system that has made it a repository for wealth of all kinds and provenances, is a set of questions with answers that the country’s public conversation has been slowly, not always voluntarily, engaging with since the 1990s.

What you actually encounter walking the streets is beautiful in a way that is difficult to argue with. Each street is a postcard is the cliché, and it is a cliché because it is accurate: the proportions of the buildings, the quality of the stone, the tramway cutting smoothly through the old centre, the lake visible at the end of the main streets opening into the specific blue that alpine lakes produce. Jonas walked us through the Altstadt with the knowledge of someone who has absorbed a place deeply enough to know its stories rather than its facts. He told us about the legend of Felix and Regula, the patron saints of Zurich, who were supposedly beheaded for refusing to renounce Christianity under the Roman emperor Decius and who then, in the version of events that churches tend to preserve, picked up their heads and walked to the spot where the Grossmünster now stands before lying down. This is the kind of legend that explains why certain churches are where they are and which, for that reason alone, is worth knowing.

The chocolate shop was Sprüngli, on the Paradeplatz, which is the central square of Zurich’s financial district and which contains several banks that between them represent a significant portion of global private wealth management. Sprüngli has been there since 1845 and operates on the principle that if you are going to do one thing, you should do it correctly and without apology. Jonas had known about my relationship with chocolate since the first time I cleared a dessert plate without apparent deliberation somewhere in Chengdu, and he had planned the Sprüngli stop as a specific destination. He sent us outside while he purchased. He emerged with two boxes. The chocolate did not outlast the day, which I record without shame.

That evening we took a dinner cruise along the Limmat, the river that runs out of the lake through the city centre, with the west bank and the east bank of Zurich passing on either side in the late light. It was one of those evenings that arrives at the end of a long sequence of experiences and gives you the feeling, quietly and without announcement, that the sequence was worth having. We said goodbye to Jonas at his station and took the night train to Paris.