If you type “best restaurants in Solothurn” into Google, you are probably standing on a cobblestone street in the old town, phone in hand, slightly overwhelmed. That reaction is completely normal. Solothurn, Switzerland’s baroque “ambassadors’ city” on the Aare river, is famously said to have the highest number of restaurants per square meter of any […]

Once every two years, the quiet cobblestone streets of Solothurn’s old town stop being quiet. Fountains that normally just trickle become gathering points, the Kreuzackerplatz fills with a Ferris wheel, and the Aare river gets a soundtrack of live concerts drifting over the water until two in the morning. This is Stadtfest Solothurn, the city’s

Solothurn looks like it should be a quiet town. Baroque facades, eleven church bells, a slow-moving Aare river, the kind of place you picture reading a book on a bench. And for most of the year, that picture holds up. But scattered through the calendar are pockets of time when this small city turns almost