Basilica of St. Cunibert

This guide to the Basilica of St. Cunibert in Cologne opens with a nineteenth-century legend: women hoping for a child once climbed into the crypt to drink from a well called the Kunibertspütz, said to be the Virgin's hidden nursery for newborns. It traces the building's roots to a chapel a bishop named Cunibert founded here around the year 600, and its slow growth into the last of Cologne's twelve great Romanesque churches, consecrated in 1247. You'll hear about the disasters that followed, from a 1376 fire to a tower collapse in an 1830 storm. Look up at the eight surviving stained-glass windows above the choir, painted around 1220.