When we speak of the Swiss Guard, what comes to mind are the Michelangelesque uniforms of the Vatican regiment, not so much the agonizing lion that Bertel Thorvaldsen designed to be sculpted in Lucerne to honor the Helvetian soldiers massacred defending the family of Louis XVI, in the heat of one of the French Revolution’s bloodiest incidents. By chance, not far from the sandstone wall on which the monument was hewn, a network of potholes and tunnels was found. Formed by the sliding of prehistoric glaciers, the spot is so rich in fossils and other geological phenomena that it became one of the city’s landmarks.

Close to the Alpine house that since the discovery has harbored a museum for this ‘glacier garden,’ a path enters the rock to connect the petrous formations. Through galleries with expressionist sections and a material bareness in dialogue with the naked stone, visitors comes upon a core of stairs where light and vegetation take the lead, and which, like Verne characters, go from the entrails of Earth to the mountaintop, from telluric fascination to the bliss of the landscape.