As long as you're ready to pay for your pleasure, Lucerne is heavenly

Two things are immediately obvious about Lucerne: it is almost impossibly beautiful, and it is breath-takingly expensive.

That's an observation from someone who lives in the orbit of one of the world's most most expensive cities. When London looks like a bargain, you know your credit card is in trouble.

As a basic point of comparison, a 14-piece take-away box of assorted sushi from London's Itsu chain costs £8. In Lucerne, something similar will cost you £28. Our hotel was the most basic I can remember staying in since student trips in the early '80s; that will set you back £130 a night. Transport and admissions are equally pricy. Want to go up the local mountain by cog railway and down by cable car? £75 per person. (For more on that adventure, read this.) A pretty, hour-long boat ride to reach the starting point of that trip? Another £26 each. The cheapest bottle of wine at a local, non-touristy pizzeria is almost £40. And so on. Lucerne is not for the faint hearted or the lightly-funded.

The fact that the whole place is so utterly beguiling gets you past the sticker shock. After a while, you just shrug, enjoy, and accept that you need to pay for your pleasures. It's the deal you have to cut to enter this Alpine utopia.

Mountain lakes have a special kind of beauty. Dramatic peaks ring jewel-toned, crystal-clear water. Cows graze ludicrously green fields. Onion-domed churches and flower-decked, peaked-roof farmhouses dot the slopes.

Lucerne kicks these norms up a notch. The town straddles the Reuss river, which is famously crossed by two medieval wooden bridges. It's framed by a steep hill still crowned by the old city wall and several watch towers Elegant hotels and charming local architecture jostle for riverfront space. Like Bavaria, the indigenous building style favours lavishly-frescoed exterior walls and exuberant iron work for balconies and shop signs. There is modern architecture here. Some of it, like the waterside Cultural Centre near the train station, is strikingly bold. But it's done sparingly and with exceptional good taste.

There's very little industry to cloud the view ... or, indeed, many signs of people living beneath the upper 10%. A boat ride around the lake, which is a must-do for any visitor, reveals an environment so perfectly engineered is seems created by Disney. There are striking homes in a variety of styles: mostly either bel époque, traditional mountain chalet or the kind of sleek modernism found in design magazines. Even the garden allotments look perfect, with all the plants in serried rows, weeds banished and tiny, beautifully maintained little sheds all flying Swiss flags.

There is no rubbish. No graffiti. No potholes in the road. I saw no homeless people. Where do they sweep all the unattractive problems? Are the misfits locked in some chamber beneath a mountain, banished like the children in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? It's a mystery. Truth be told, I think actually living here ... assuming you could afford it ... could feel a bit repressive. But it's an idyllic place to

spend a long weekend.

WALKING TOUR
The greatest joy of Lucerne is to be had by simply walking around. The city is marvellously compact, with all of its main sites being within not much more than a square mile. Playing to this advantage, the city is strewn with benches and outdoor cafes.  The local tourist department produces a booklet with a map of a suggested route that loops the essentials. You can do a comprehensive walking tour in a day, though we broke our exploration into three parts over our long weekend. (Each, unsurprisingly, ending up at the same microbrewery with a magnificent riverside view. Of that, more in the next entry.)

First, wander down the Reuss, taking in the medieval bridges with their striking paintings in the long procession of roof trusses. The Kapelbrücke, closer to the lake and with a sharp change in direction where a stone watch tower breaks its flow, is more famous, but I prefer the Spreuerbrücke with its striking scenes of the Danse Macabre. One assumes privileged Luzerners throughout history have benefitted from the skeletons cavorting with the rich and powerful, reminding them that death comes to us all. In between the two bridges you'll find the Jesuit Church, a particularly bright and cheerful version of Northern Baroque. The ornate plasterwork owes more to Chinese wallpaper than traditional religious iconography: look for peacocks hiding in the curlicues.

The old town on the north side of the Reuss is decorated with a range of painted buildings that elevate the historic centre to an outdoor art gallery. The style and freshness of colour on many of these buildings suggests the painting is from ... or at least, was restored in ... the 20th century, but all the themes conjure old world elegance. Lots of happy hunters and elegantly dressed burgers and their ladies feasting amidst wreaths of Renaissance-style foliage and flying putti. Cobbled lanes open into picturesque little squares decorated with fountains ornamented with statues. Knights, their ladies and fairy tale figures spout water, their features painted and gilded as if the craftsman just stepped away from his creation.

On another expedition, we climbed up through quiet, leafy residential streets to the line of medieval walls. You can keep climbing up several different towers: we chose the Männliturm for astonishing views. You can supposedly see 74 different Alpine peaks from up here. and you get an up-close view of the eponymous "little man", actually a towering knight holding a pennant who watches over the city.

Back down at the lake level, a promenade along the northern side of the waterfront beyond the mouth of the river reveals another kind of town. This is all 19th century: like Cannes, a town built for well-heeled tourists. Grand hotels look over a tree-lined boulevard to a wide promenade dotted with fanciful light posts and a grand band shell. The opulent architecture of the waterfront hides a modern section of the town that is perhaps Lucerne's least charming, but it's there you'll find its most iconic image.

An enormous, weeping lion (the Löwendenkmal) is carved into a rock face above a still pool. Two centuries of visitors, including famous American author Mark Twain, have written about the sculpture's ability to stir emotion. It commemorates a slaughter of Swiss Guards who died defending the French king during the revolution. The sculptor is Bertel Thorvaldson, the Danish master who's known as the Northern Canova. (It was like stumbling on an old friend; one of Piers' cousins is a curator at Thorvaldson's museum in Copenhagen. Read about it here.) This would be a remarkably peaceful place if it weren't for the bus tours that disgorge scores of visitors every few minutes. Grab a bench and wait. Few of them linger for much longer than it takes to snap a few selfies in front of the grieving feline. If you can hit a window in between groups, this is a zen-like place of soul soothing.

AT HOME WITH WAGNER
Beyond the walking tour route is one more sight that will be of interest only to ardent opera fans. Richard Wagner, fleeing from debt and living on the largess of fans with Swiss properties, spent some of his most productive years in Switzerland. He lived in a gracious villa on Lake Lucerne that sits on a small promontory with a magnificent sweep of lawns leading down to the lake. Here, while composing the foundations of his Ring cycle, he also hosted famous visitors like King Ludwig of Bavaria and Frederick Nietzsche.

Today it's a museum, set in a park at the back of a community sports complex out in the suburbs. At £8, admission is cheap for Lucerne, but that's because there's not a great deal here. Besides inspiring views, the ground floor ... which is still decorated in classic 19th century style ... has a collection of portraits and some cases showing off Wagner memorabilia. There are musical scores, personal correspondence and personal effects like his trademark hat and velvet jacket. I was most interested in photos and promotional posters from early productions of The Ring, revealing effete Siegfrieds and beefy Brunhildes in heavy medieval costume. How times have changed!

By the time you get upstairs they've run out of artefacts, so this floor has videos and a temporary exhibit. You can watch videos on Wagner's life and extracts of live performances. There's currently a show on a comic book about Wagner's life. How it came about from concept through production, with lots of commentary from the illustrator on the choices made for drawing style. It's fair to say the appeal is fairly limited. I did enjoy, however, their attempt at hands-on participation. You can sit down and try your hand at some cartooning, following boards with step-by-step instructions, while listening to a Wagner playlist.

On the day of our visit, admission also included a piano recital. Unfortunately, the lady who sold us the tickets forgot to mention that it would be preceded by a 45-minute lecture in German, and that there would be no Wagner on the programme.

I shouldn't have been surprised. In Lucerne, you pay for your pleasure, one way or another.