Frankenthal

Frankenthal fired porcelain that princes fought to own. For half a century from 1755 the Frankenthal manufactory, under Palatine elector Carl Theodor's wing, produced figures and services ranked with Meissen and Nymphenburg — mythologies in glaze, chinoiserie, the celebrated modellers Lück and Melchior — until war closed the kilns in 1799; today the Erkenbert-Museum guards a superb collection, collectors worldwide chase the rampant-lion mark, and the town celebrates its white gold with exhibitions and a porcelain festival.

The deeper foundation was refuge: in the sixteenth century Frankenthal received Dutch and Walloon Protestants fleeing Spanish persecution, and the newcomers made it briefly one of the Rhine's most vigorous towns of goldsmiths, weavers and painters — the "Frankenthal school" of landscape artists among them — before the devastations of 1689 levelled the prosperity. The ruin of the Erkenbert basilica, the medieval abbey shell in the town's heart, survived everything and anchors the centre as an open-air monument.

Industry returned with iron and precision: Frankenthal became a machine city — printing presses that equipped the world's pressrooms, and pumps and valves from KSB, still headquartered here and globally at work wherever liquids move. The Baroque twelve-apostle church and Rathaus square, generous parks, and the Strandbad lake add civic comforts; Worms, Mannheim and the Wine Route lie minutes away. Porcelain, presses and pumps: Frankenthal's exports were always finely engineered.