Spuerkeess Building

Cross the Adolphe Bridge from the old town and the first thing that meets you is a castle with a clock. It belongs to a bank — the Spuerkeess, the state savings bank, founded in 1856 and still owned by the country — and it was built to say so. The architect Jean-Pierre Koenig gave it a French Renaissance manner with Art Nouveau trimmings and a tower 46 metres high, and it was opened on the 15th of November 1913, three years after work began, without any ceremony at all. At the main door two figures by the sculptor Jean Mich keep watch: on the left Mercury, god of commerce, with a horn of plenty; on the right Fortuna, with a full purse in her hands. You are meant to notice which one carries the money.

The square in front, the Place de Metz, is named for the city's twin, and Robert Schuman, born in Clausen and deputy for Metz, stood here in June 1953 as the living symbol of the pairing. The other big building on the square, the former offices of the imperial Alsace-Lorraine railways, has a history of its own: in 1952 it became the first seat of the High Authority of the Coal and Steel Community — the first European institution, run from here by Jean Monnet, before Europe moved up to the Kirchberg.

Under your feet is the odd part. The Bourbon plateau is hollow with the old fortress's casemates, and in 1987 the bank decided to use them, extending a tunnel to join its four buildings on the plateau. Somebody asked what to do with the tunnel itself, and the answer, opened in 1993, was a gallery: Am Tunnel, which shows more than a hundred Luxembourgish artists and holds a permanent collection of work by Edward Steichen, the photographer from Bivange who ran the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A bank vault turned into a museum of pictures is not a bad summary of the country's last century.