Saint Joseph's Church

The Limpertsberg is a quarter of the belle époque: villas and apartment houses that went up on the hill above the Glacis in the twenty years before the First World War, as the city, freed from its walls, discovered it had room to spread. By 1909 three thousand people lived up here, a long way from the cathedral, and the city council voted them a church. Nicolas Petit, the city architect, drew it; the contractor Achille Giorgetti built it between 1910 and 1913; and it was consecrated on the 30th of April 1913.

Petit chose the Romanesque of the Rhineland — round arches, heavy towers, the look of the thirteenth-century churches down the Moselle — and Saint Joseph's turned out to be the last church in the country built that way. It is a close cousin of the abbey church at Clervaux, designed a few years earlier, and one of the most imposing buildings on the hill. The inside was remade in 1976 by the Trier architect Willy Hahn, who put behind the altar the thing to look for: a tabernacle column six and a half metres high, in the form of a tree of life, with a calvary at the top. New windows by André Haagen were cut into the nave at the same time to let in the light the old design had kept out. There is a seventeenth-century Immaculate Conception too, with a Saint Joseph added to it by the sculptor Albert Hames, and an organ from Lübeck that replaced the original in 1955.

If the doors are open, go in for the column. If they are not, walk round the outside and count the arches; that is what the architect wanted you to do.