Café & Conditorei 1842

Café & Conditorei 1842 in Zurich sits on ground the guide traces back to the Manesse family, whose fortified house here is believed to have sheltered scribes copying love songs by a hundred and forty poets around the year 1300 into what became the Codex Manesse. It follows that book's stranger afterlife once the Manesses lost their grip on the city: seized amid fighting in Heidelberg, carried off as war plunder to Paris, and passed between princes and dealers for two centuries. Listen for how a confectioner's family later built the shopfront you see today, on a spot that had already outlived the manuscript it once housed.