Friedrichshafen

Friedrichshafen taught the world that ships could sail the sky. From a floating hangar on Lake Constance, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin lifted his first rigid airship in July 1900, and for four decades the town built the giants — Graf Zeppelin circling the globe, Hindenburg crossing the Atlantic — that made its name a common noun. The Zeppelin Museum on the harbour, in the old Bauhaus-era lakeside station, holds the world's largest airship collection, including a walk-in reconstruction of the Hindenburg's improbably elegant passenger quarters; and the story refuses to end, for modern Zeppelin NT ships still rise from the local field, carrying sightseers over the lake their ancestors made famous.

The genius was contagious: Claude Dornier's flying boats, celebrated in the Dornier Museum by the airport, and a century of engineering that still powers the town's gearbox and aerospace industries. The price was paid in 1944, when bombing levelled the old centre; Friedrichshafen rebuilt itself plainly and put its beauty where it always was — on the water.

The lakefront is the reward: a long promenade from the twin-towered Schlosskirche to the moles, ferries fanning out to Switzerland, and on clear days the whole Alpine wall standing in the south like scenery. The Graf-Zeppelin-Haus anchors the concert season above the yacht harbour, trade fairs fill the Messe, and the zeppelin drifts overhead — the calmest possible monument to audacity.