Ingolstadt

Ingolstadt has a habit of producing things that conquer the world. On 23 April 1516 the assembled Bavarian estates proclaimed here the Reinheitsgebot, the beer purity law — barley, hops and water, the oldest food regulation still effectively in force. The city's university, founded in 1472, added two more exports of a different order: Adam Weishaupt founded the Illuminati among its faculty in 1776, gifting the world its most durable conspiracy theory, and Mary Shelley chose the same university as the place where Victor Frankenstein assembles his creature — literature's most famous laboratory stands, fictionally, in Ingolstadt.

The real city was Bavaria's fortress and second residence: the Gothic Liebfrauenmünster with its oblique twin towers, the Kreuztor gate — one of Germany's prettiest — and the massive Neues Schloss, now the Bavarian Army Museum, ring a handsomely preserved old town on the young Danube.

The modern conqueror is Audi. Headquartered here since 1949, the company remade Ingolstadt into one of Germany's most prosperous cities; the museum mobile in the glass Audi Forum parades a century of silver machines, and — the city's quietest luxury — the Audi Sommerkonzerte bring world-class orchestras and soloists to the Danube each summer, a festival grown from a factory's pride into a fixture of the Bavarian musical calendar. Beer law, monsters, secret societies and symphonies: Ingolstadt's exports keep their edge.