Wieselhaus

Wieselhaus stands in Augsburg’s Domviertel, where Italian Renaissance architecture appears through arcades, loggias, and glass-fronted openings. The building began around 1530 and gained a side extension after 1550.

Johann Wiesel lived and worked here from 1637 to 1642, making eyeglasses, telescopes, and microscopes. A renovation beginning in 2009 reopened arcades that had been walled up during the seventeenth century. Since 2014, the building has housed the Fugger and Welser Museum, exploring Augsburg’s merchant families, trade, finance, mining, technology, and communication networks. Interactive displays bring historical encounters to life, including a simulated business conversation between Jakob Fugger and Bartholomäus V. Welser.

The vaulted cellar examines metallurgy and miners’ working conditions, while the upper floors explore patrician life around 1500. A reconstructed golden writing room shows how the Fugger business operated. The garden contains plants associated with sixteenth-century humanists, including Markus Welser and Leonhart Rauwolff. An interactive table even takes you on a virtual sea voyage to India.