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Mainz changed the world with twenty-six pieces of metal. Around 1450, in a workshop near the cathedral, Johannes Gutenberg perfected printing with movable type and pulled the forty-two-line Bible from his press — the invention of the modern information age, in the judgment of most rankings the millennium's most consequential. The Gutenberg Museum guards two of the surviving Bibles and demonstrates the press daily; the city that made books possible remains a media capital, home to Germany's second television network.

Roman Mogontiacum founded the site as a legionary headquarters on the Rhine — the ship museum displays its actual warships — and the thousand-year sandstone cathedral, coronation church of the Holy Roman Empire's arch-chancellors, anchors a old town of rococo façades and wine taverns. Wine is constitutional here: Mainz leads Germany's greatest wine region, hosts the national wine institutes, and conducts its affairs with a glass of Riesling never far away — most riotously during Fassenacht, the Rhenish carnival at its most political and musical.

Music runs through the city's presses too: the venerable house of Schott, publishers here since 1770, issued Beethoven's Ninth and Wagner's Ring to the world. The Staatstheater, the Mainz Philharmonic and the cathedral's ancient choir tradition perform the inheritance, while Chagall's blue windows in St Stephan's provide the visual accompaniment — light, like print, made transmissible.