Lucerne kept what other Swiss cities rebuilt away: an almost complete 1386 city wall, a Dance of Death cycle over the Reuss, and a monastery root reaching back to 735. Three days trace the town from forest-canton oath to Belle Epoque resort.
The 1386 fortification still stands almost complete: 870 metres of rampart and nine towers, four of them climbable. The Zytturm carries Lucerne's oldest clock, made in 1535, which is allowed to strike each hour one minute before every other clock in town.
Built in 1408 as the mill bridge, the only point where chaff (Spreu) could legally be tipped into the Reuss. Its 45 surviving gable paintings form Kaspar Meglinger's Dance of Death cycle of 1626-35, the largest preserved sequence of its kind in Switzerland.
The court church traces back to a Benedictine monastery founded around 735, the settlement from which the whole city grew. The present building went up in 1633-39 after fire destroyed the Romanesque basilica, keeping only the two Gothic towers of 1525.
Begun around 1270 for the Franciscans, this is the oldest church interior in the city and the only surviving mendicant church in central Switzerland. The nave is hung with painted replicas of battle banners Lucerne captured between 1386 and 1712.
Edouard Castres painted this 1,100 square metre circular canvas in 1881. It shows the 87,000 men of General Bourbaki's French army crossing into Switzerland to be interned in 1871, one of the earliest depictions of organised humanitarian relief.
Anton Isenmann built the town hall in 1602-06 in Italian Renaissance form under an enormous Bernese-style farmhouse roof, a deliberate statement of independence by a Catholic patrician republic. The arcades below still host the twice-weekly market.
Uncovered in 1872 when a cellar was dug, the site exposed 32 glacial potholes ground out around 20,000 years ago alongside palm and shell fossils from a subtropical sea. The Alhambra mirror maze of 1896 survives from the same age of showmanship.
The quay was reclaimed from the lake in 1835-44, and the palace hotels along it turned Lucerne into the capital of Alpine tourism. The Schweizerhof opened in 1845; Tolstoy set his 1857 story Lucerne outside it, and Queen Victoria stayed in 1868.
Switzerland's transport museum opened in 1959 and holds the country's industrial memory: Gotthard tunnel boring gear, mail coaches that crossed the passes before the railways, the story of the 1847 Spanisch-Brotli-Bahn, and a hall of steam locomotives.
The Gothic fountain of 1481 stands where Lucerne staged its Easter passion plays before crowds of thousands in the 16th century, and where the city is said to have sworn its alliance with the three forest cantons in 1332.
Wagner rented this lakeside villa from 1866 to 1872, completed Die Meistersinger here and had the Siegfried Idyll played on the staircase for Cosima's birthday in 1870. The rooms keep his Erard grand piano, death mask and correspondence.
This freestanding sandstone gateway is all that survived the fire of 5 February 1971, which destroyed the 1896 station hall in a few hours. It was re-erected on the square in 1996 as a memorial to the railway age that first made Lucerne reachable.