Each story is rooted in real local history and landmarks
A child discovers that one Dachhimmel painting on Rathausgasse changes at night, revealing a hidden message from a 16th-century craftsman about a treasure beneath the old town. As they decode the shifting patterns, they learn the stories of the tradespeople who once lived and worked beneath Aarau's painted eaves.
Young Albert, lonely and homesick at the Winteler house, chases a beam of light through Aarau's streets one evening and discovers that if you run fast enough, time itself stands still. Through this magical retelling of the famous 'Aarau Question,' a child learns that the biggest ideas in science can start with the simplest question asked by a curious teenager.
It is April 1798, and a child watches the tree of freedom go up in Aarau's main square as Switzerland's very first national parliament convenes in the Rathaus. The child befriends a young delegate brimming with revolutionary ideals, only to say a bittersweet goodbye just five months later when the capital moves to Lucerne and Aarau's brief moment of glory fades into history.
A child sneaks into the Meyersche Stollen and discovers the enormous wooden waterwheel still turning in the dark, powered by a mysterious underground river. Deeper in the tunnels, they encounter the ghost of Johann Rudolf Meyer, who jealously guards the secret of his 2,000-metre labyrinth -- the greatest engineering project nobody was ever supposed to know about.
The Oberer Turm has watched over Aarau for 800 years. When a child touches the 1532 clockwork mechanism, they are transported to different eras: the Kyburg founding around 1240, the Bernese conquest of 1415, the revolutionary fervour of 1798, and the day young Einstein arrived in 1895. Each era leaves a mark on the tower's ancient stones.
In 17th-century Aarau, a child must paint the most beautiful Dachhimmel in the city to win a master painter competition and save their family's workshop. But the paints have a mind of their own -- each colour insists on telling its own story, and the child must listen to all of them before the eaves will reveal their true masterpiece.
A child finds a sheet from the Meyer-Weiss Atlas in the cantonal library. The mountains begin to rise from the paper, glaciers glisten, and rivers flow across the desk. The child must help the Meyer brothers navigate the treacherous Oberaletsch Glacier and reach the summit of the Jungfrau before the map folds shut and traps them all inside.
At midnight, the figures in Felix Hoffmann's stained-glass windows step out of their coloured glass panels and wander through the darkened Stadtkirche. A child who has fallen asleep in a pew must guide the luminous figures back into their windows before dawn, learning along the way the stories of Aarau's Reformation and the twelve altars that were lost forever in 1528.
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