Itzehoe

Itzehoe begins with Charlemagne and peaks with a visionary. The town counts its origin from a fortress the emperor's men raised against the Danes around 810 — making it one of Schleswig-Holstein's oldest settlements — and it grew rich where the Stör river bent broadly toward the Elbe, a little port of grain, cement and trade whose ships tied up in the town's very centre until the loop was filled in; the harbour on the tidal Stör still brings salt water and gulls to the doorstep.

The visionary arrived in 1907: Wenzel Hablik, Bohemian-born painter, designer and utopian, settled in Itzehoe and dreamed in crystal — expressionist canvases of glass cathedrals in mountain skies, flying settlements, interiors and textiles designed down to the cutlery with his weaver wife Elisabeth Lindemann. The Wenzel-Hablik-Museum keeps this glittering estate, one of the most complete universes of expressionist utopia anywhere, and lends the sober town a permanent aurora.

Around it, Itzehoe works and serves as the Steinburg district's capital: the classicist church of St Laurentii with its ancient convent cloister behind, the theatre — successor to a stage tradition centuries old, now touring the whole west coast — the Wochenmarkt on the Berliner Platz, and the cement and papermill chimneys of the Elbe marshes beyond. The Wilstermarsch nearby dips to Germany's lowest point below sea level: fitting country for a town that painted its heights instead.