Abbey of Saint Gall

The Abbey of Saint Gall stands at the heart of the Swiss city that grew up around it, and it holds one of the oldest and most beautiful monastic libraries in the world. Tradition says that around 612 the Irish monk Gallus, a companion of Saint Columbanus, built a hermit's cell in this valley; about a century later the priest Otmar founded a Benedictine monastery on the spot. From the ninth century it was one of the leading centres of learning in Europe, home to scholars such as Notker the Stammerer, and its abbots later ruled as princes of the Holy Roman Empire. UNESCO inscribed the abbey precinct in 1983 as a perfect example of a great Carolingian monastery.

Almost nothing medieval survives above ground. In the eighteenth century the abbots swept away the old buildings and replaced them with a late Baroque ensemble, built between 1755 and 1768, with Peter Thumb among the architects. The abbey was dissolved in 1805; in the mid-nineteenth century its church became the cathedral of the new diocese of St. Gallen, with part of the monastic buildings given to the bishop.

The reason people travel here is the Abbey Library. Its Rococo hall, also designed by Peter Thumb, is a two-storey room of carved and inlaid walnut and cherry, curving galleries and ceiling paintings, and visitors shuffle across its parquet in felt overslippers. The collection runs to some 160,000 volumes, including about 2,100 manuscripts, of which some 400 are more than a thousand years old — among them early examples of neumes, the medieval precursors of musical notation, and a grammar book with Old Irish verse in its margins. The library also keeps the Plan of Saint Gall, drawn around 820–830: an ideal layout for a Carolingian monastery that was never built, and the only major architectural drawing to survive from the roughly seven centuries after the fall of Rome. Exhibitions rotate the manuscripts on display.

Beneath the precinct, a lapidarium shows carved stones from the vanished Carolingian and Ottonian buildings. The abbey also appears in the history of astronomy: the supernova of 1006 was recorded here, the most northerly place from which a sighting is known.

Getting there

The abbey precinct is in the old town of St. Gallen, a 5–10 minute walk from the main railway station. St. Gallen–Altenrhein Airport (ACH) is about 15 km away on Lake Constance and has limited scheduled flights.