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Wiesbaden was Europe's drawing room: in the nineteenth century the hot springs that the Romans already prized — twenty-six of them, steaming at up to sixty-six degrees — drew emperors, tsars and the merely rich to a city built entirely for pleasure of the more dignified kind. The ensemble survives almost untouched by war: the colonnaded Kurhaus with its casino, the villa quarters' eclectic palaces, the Neroberg funicular — water-powered since 1888 — rising to the golden onion domes of the Russian chapel, built for a Nassau duchess and serving the spa's Russian colony, Dostoevsky included: his catastrophic sessions at the Wiesbaden tables gave literature The Gambler.

As capital of Hesse, the city added administrative gravity to its leisure; as a wine capital of the Rheingau, whose Riesling slopes begin at its edge, it never risked excessive sobriety — the Rheingau Wine Festival turns the centre into Germany's longest wine bar each August.

The Hessisches Staatstheater, a neo-baroque jewel donated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, hosts the Internationale Maifestspiele, founded in 1896 in emulation of Bayreuth and still gathering international opera, dance and theatre each May; the Hessian State Orchestra and the Kurhaus's Friedrich-von-Thiersch-Saal carry the concert season. Wiesbaden's promise remains what the springs always advertised: civilisation, taken warm.