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

"I want to describe a place - mind you, not its beauty, but the components that make it up: it is a small square in the heart of Poschiavo, a multi-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 pure Romanesque campanile that towers over the village, colossal, like a petrified cry: "Hikers, you are in the south!" - "massive" would be the word in the guidebook, or "magnificent". A tapered dwelling house with tiny, delicate bay windows on both sides and gargoyles like long-necked mythical animals. 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 stretchers. The Catholic parish. The cloistered walls of the Augustinian convent, above it a slender bell tower with a luminous copper onion dome, above mountain slopes with rock and coniferous forest, above the white marble of the three-thousand-meter-high Sassalbo, above the sky. And to enliven 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 amazed, sit in front of the sights of the remotest 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 permanently exhibited. The exhibition can be visited from Monday to Friday, 10:00-12:00 or 15:00-17:00. Admission is free, but you must first register by phone at T +41 79 741 05 70.

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