Frankfurt

Frankfurt wears the only real skyline in Germany — "Mainhattan", bankers' towers above a medieval coronation city — and the contrast is the point: this has always been a place where money and mind negotiate. Holy Roman Emperors were elected and crowned here for centuries, in the Römer's halls and the cathedral; in 1848 the Paulskirche hosted Germany's first freely elected parliament, the country's democratic birthplace; and the Book Fair, heir to five centuries of Frankfurt book trading, remains the publishing world's annual capital.

The city's greatest export was born on the Grosser Hirschgraben in 1749: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose family house — rebuilt, like most of the old town, after the war — begins any literary pilgrimage in Germany. The Städel supplies the painting canon from Holbein to Beckmann along the museum embankment; the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer supplied the twentieth century's most influential critique of it all; and apple wine in Sachsenhausen supplies the antidote.

Musically Frankfurt boxes above even its financial weight: the Oper Frankfurt is a perennial "Opera House of the Year", admired throughout Europe for ensemble and daring; the Alte Oper, the resurrected grand concert house, and the hr-Sinfonieorchester anchor the concert season; and the Hoch Conservatory once trained Clara Schumann's pupils and Hindemith alike. Commerce, it turns out, can keep excellent time.