Espace Madeleine / Temple de la Madeleine

About this audio guide

This guide to the Temple de la Madeleine in Geneva starts with a count: more than twenty-five side chapels once filled one of the city's richest parish churches, before Reformation preachers linked to Guillaume Farel and Jean Calvin swept through in the fifteen-thirties. It also traces an earlier disaster, a fourteen-thirty fire that gutted the building down to its Romanesque bell tower, which still stands beside you and holds the oldest signed bell in the canton. Stand near that tower and listen for the story of the bell-founder, Ulric, who cast it around fourteen twenty.