Luxury escorts in St. Gallen

St. Gallen wove its fortune: for two centuries its embroidered textiles dressed the courts of Europe — they still dress the Paris couture houses — and the wealth built a city of gabled merchant houses around one of Christendom's great monuments. The Abbey precinct, with its rococo library of a hundred and seventy thousand volumes under a painted ceiling, is a UNESCO site that would anchor a city three times the size; the Textile Museum tells the rest of the story a street away.

The modern city runs on two calendars we know well: the university — HSG, the German-speaking world's first business school — brings conferences, symposia and an executive-education traffic that fills the good hotels midweek, and the Olma fairs each autumn fill everything else. An engagement here is compact and civilised: the Erststock restaurants — first-floor parlours in the old merchant houses — serve the region's cooking in panelled rooms an arm's length wide, and the Appenzell hills begin at the city's edge for an afternoon among the smallest, oldest villages in the east. Companions speak German and English; Zurich is an hour west.