Gotha

Gotha crowns its hill with the largest early-baroque palace complex in Germany: Schloss Friedenstein, built mid-Thirty-Years'-War by a duke who named it "stone of peace" and filled it with everything an enlightened court required — art chambers, a research library of European rank, scientific cabinets, and a theatre that became the palace's greatest treasure. The Ekhof Theatre of 1683 preserves its original wooden stage machinery in working order — among the oldest anywhere — and is named for Conrad Ekhof, the "father of German acting", whose troupe made Gotha home to Germany's first permanent court theatre with salaried actors; each summer the Ekhof Festival performs baroque opera with the seventeenth-century scenery gliding on its original ropes.

The little residence thought big: the Almanach de Gotha, published here from 1763, became Europe's genealogical bible — to be "in the Gotha" meant to exist aristocratically — while the Perthes cartographic house mapped the world for every nineteenth-century explorer's shelf; the collections of both survive in the town. Gotha insurance, Gotha sausages and, less cosily, the Gotha congress of 1875 that Marx critiqued, complete an improbable export list.

Below the palace, the red town hall presides over a handsome market descending the slope; the Thuringian forest rises behind. The Thuringia Philharmonic Gotha-Eisenach carries the musical line of a court that always preferred culture to conquest — the stone of peace, still holding.