Марбург

"Other towns have a university," the saying goes, "Marburg is one." Founded in 1527 as the world's first Protestant university, the Philipps-Universität and its town have been indistinguishable ever since: lecture halls in palaces, seminars in medieval houses, and a student population that keeps the steep old town — a staircase city of half-timber climbing from the Lahn to the landgraves' castle — permanently young. The Brothers Grimm studied here and began collecting their tales; Lomonosov, Russia's universal genius, studied here; Pasternak studied philosophy here and turned to poetry; the roll-call runs on through Nobel science and the Marburg school of philosophers.

Below, at the town's edge, rises the building that started everything: the Elisabethkirche, begun 1235 over the tomb of St Elizabeth of Hungary — the landgravine who gave her wealth to the poor and died at twenty-four — Germany's first purely Gothic church, whose golden shrine made Marburg a great medieval pilgrimage. In the castle above, in 1529, Luther and Zwingli disputed the Eucharist at the Marburg Colloquy: Protestantism's paths divided in that hall.

Grimm-themed figures now dot the lanes — the Grimm-Dich path's oversized slipper and frog — while the university church, concert seasons and student cellars sound the town's registers. Marburg remains what it has been for five centuries: knowledge, built on a hillside.