Halle

Halle gave the world Handel, and has never let the world forget it. Georg Friedrich Händel was born here in 1685 — the same annus mirabilis as Bach and Scarlatti — learned the organ at the Marktkirche, and left for Hamburg, Italy and London glory; his birth house is now one of Europe's finest composer museums, his monument commands the market square, and each June the Handel Festival fills the city's churches and the Galgenberg open-air theatre with his operas and oratorios, sung by the international early-music elite. The Staatskapelle Halle and the opera carry the patron year-round.

The city beneath the five towers — the Marktkirche's four joined by the free-standing Red Tower — grew rich on salt: the Halloren brotherhood of salters, Germany's oldest surviving guild, still parades in silver-buttoned costume, and the Halloren chocolate factory, the country's oldest, sweetened the inheritance. Luther preached here and his death mask rests in the Marktkirche; the Francke Foundations, a vast baroque school-city of the Pietist enlightenment, and the Leopoldina, Germany's national academy of sciences, give Halle intellectual rank; the university it shares with Wittenberg counts among the country's venerable.

Add the Moritzburg's expressionist art collection and the prehistoric Nebra Sky Disc in the state museum, and Halle emerges as it deserves: not Leipzig's neighbour but a capital in its own right.