This story needs a short preamble: I’m attending an evening course for adults set up by my Canton on how to do your own taxes here in Switzerland (and some of this topic is worth an oddity post on itself), and the teacher (a smart young man who works for the Taxation office by day) was explaining how you can deduct some expenses, and specifically the ones to go back and forth to your job.

Now, Switzerland likes to encourage people to use public transportation, so you can deduct the cost of the annual ticket, or even a hefty 700 CHF for a bike. Yearly! But sometimes it can’t work out: you can explain why you need to use your car, and, assuming the Taxation Office agrees with you, you can deduct a sum per Km of your daily commute.

Our teacher went on to explain that they use Google Maps, or ViaMichelin, to plot the shortest road path between your home and your workplace, and use that (which makes sense), but then as an aside added, to an old lady asking about it (and here’s the kicker)… “Oh yeah, we used to have an official Federal document that allowed to calculate the distances between towns… but it was dismissed years ago! It used to tell you the distance from bell tower to bell tower”.

I was this close to burst out laughing: is there anything more… European than measuring distances that way? The missing bell towers from pictures of US towns is one of the things that I had not noticed consciously for a long while… but when you do, it’s really glaring. There are some obviously, but they tend to be really short, square and made of wood. Here, and in most of the continent I’d say, they really are an element of the basic fabric of territory: the kind of parochial “my town is better than yours” is called “campanilismo” (campanile is the Italian word for bell tower)!

And on the other hand, the idea of making such a system the mandated federal standard I think is the kind of adorable/quaint/odd that warrants this story a place in my “Swiss Oddity” collection.