The research for this book developed after I noticed something remarkable. It started as a sequence of observations that gradually expanded into research questions and a research strategy. By expressing my curiosity-driven enthusiasm in this introduction, I want to present the Gotthard as a fascinating topic of study. This introduction reflects upon the research process and makes the reader familiar with the topic in the same gradual way as I did. Sharing memories of my first encounters with the Gotthard image will bring us to various places in Switzerland, where the Gotthard recurs as a reference to different periods in Swiss history. The introduction offers many faces of the Gotthard, evokes many questions and risks being confusing. Yet, this elusiveness makes the ‘Gotthard’ an exiting and worthy topic of academic research.

The three sections of this introduction address the main phases of my project. First, I will describe images of the Gotthard in the Kunsthaus of Zurich and the Verkehrshaus in Lucerne, from which this research germinated. After having developed sensitivity to the Gotthard's images, they seemed to be everywhere. This led me on a search to learn more about the richness of the Gotthard's history and its symbolic meaning in Swiss society – the second stage of the project. Finally, I realised that despite the many existing studies on the Gotthard, the relationship between the Gotthard as a railway project and the Gotthard as a mythical geographical space has received little attention in scholarly research. From this insight, I developed my own research.

Image 1, Zurich Switzerland: The art museum, Kunsthaus, exhibits a painting entitled Der Gotthardpost. The painting depicts a yellow-and-black horse-drawn mail coach that descends the winding southern Gotthard pass road at full speed. A herd of cows obstructs the coach. A calf from the herd – frightened by the speed of the coach – jumps frantically out off the way. One of Switzerland's most famous painters, Rudolf Koller (1828-1905), painted it in the 1870s. In the museum, the painting figures next to other highlights of Swiss nineteenth and twentieth-century art works of, for example, Ferdinand Hodler and Johann Heinrich Füssli. Rumour has it that Koller himself disliked his creation, but the museum presents it as a successful Swiss interpretation of international realism and animal painting.