Kirchplatz bei der Kirche San Vittore Mauro (Station 7 Rundgang Hildesheimer)

"I want to describe a square - not its beauty, mind you, but the components of which it is composed: it is a small square in the heart of Poschiavo, a many-angled gallery to which a few steps lead. It is lined with the following buildings: the church of San Vittore in broad rustic Gothic, the oversized, but immaculately Romanesque campanile, which towers over the village, colossal, like a petrified cry: "Wanderer, you are in the south!" - "massive" would be the word in the travel guide, or "magnificent". A conical residential building with tiny, delicate bay windows on both sides and gargoyles like long-necked mythical creatures. The ossario, the ossuary, an eerily pretty memento mori with a baroque window and ornate wrought iron grilles, behind which, neatly arranged on shelves, skull stands next to skull and, as handy props, hang two painted biers. The Catholic parish. The cloister walls of the Augustinian convent, above it a slender bell tower with a shining copper onion dome, above it mountain slopes with rock and coniferous forest, above the white marble of the three-thousand-meter-high Sassalbo, above it the sky. And to liven up the picture: children playing ball, knitting mothers and, at certain times of the year, photographing strangers and entire school classes from northern Switzerland, who, drawing and marvelling, sit in front of the sights of the most remote corners of their homeland. The reader who is confused by this picture has grasped it correctly."

In the Augustinian convent mentioned by Hildesheimer, 22 of his collages are on permanent display. The exhibition can be visited from Monday to Friday, 10:00-12:00 or 15:00-17:00. Admission is free, but you have to register in advance by calling T +41 79 741 05 70.

Source: Experience of the Unexpected, in Merian 14/8, 1961