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Heidelberg taught the world what Romanticism looks like: a ruined castle glowing red above a baroque old town, the Neckar sliding beneath the Old Bridge, wooded hills closing the frame. Goethe lost his heart here repeatedly, Turner painted the view in a golden haze, and the Philosophers' Way across the river — where professors walked their thoughts — still offers the panorama that launched a thousand engravings. The castle itself, blown up by French armies and never fully rebuilt, became Europe's most celebrated ruin, complete with the Great Tun, a wine barrel of ballroom proportions guarded by the legend of the dwarf Perkeo.

Beneath the scenery works Germany's oldest university, founded 1386, whose alumni and faculty run from medieval scholastics through Hegel, Bunsen and Max Weber to a crowd of Nobel laureates; the Student Prison, its walls frescoed by generations of cheerfully incarcerated duellists, preserves academia's unrulier past. Robert Schumann studied law here just long enough to confirm he should study music instead.

The city's soundtrack ranges from the operetta sighs of "The Student Prince" — Broadway's love letter to Alt-Heidelberg — to a serious present: the Theater und Orchester Heidelberg, castle festival performances in the courtyard each summer, and the Heidelberger Frühling, one of Germany's most inventive music festivals. The heart, as the old song admits, stays lost here.