Любек

Lübeck was the queen of the Hanseatic League, and the crown still fits. From behind the twin-towered Holstentor — the fortified gate every German once carried on the fifty-mark note — the old town rises on its island: seven spires, brick Gothic invented here and exported around the Baltic, merchants' gabled houses and hidden courtyard passages, the whole ensemble among Germany's first UNESCO World Heritage listings. The Marienkirche set the architectural pattern for a hundred Baltic churches; its shattered bells, left where they fell in 1942, lie in a side chapel as the city's quietest memorial.

No town of two hundred thousand claims three Nobel Prizes so intimately: Thomas Mann, whose Buddenbrooks chronicled his own Lübeck merchant dynasty — the Buddenbrookhaus stands on Mengstrasse; Günter Grass, who settled here, with his own museum; and Willy Brandt, born in the workers' quarter, honoured in his memorial house. Marzipan, perfected by Niederegger across from the town hall, sweetens the literary pilgrimage.

Music crowns it: Buxtehude presided over the Marienkirche's organs and evening concerts, drawing the twenty-year-old Bach to walk four hundred kilometres just to listen — the most famous pilgrimage in music history. Today the Musikhochschule, the theatre and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival's summer concerts keep the organ city's tradition sounding across the Baltic.