Köln

Köln is a state of mind with a cathedral attached. The Dom — begun 1248, abandoned, finished 632 years later true to the medieval plans, UNESCO-listed and still Germany's most visited monument — holds the golden Shrine of the Three Kings and two towers that dwarf the city that loves it. Around it spreads Roman Colonia, the city that gave itself its name: Germany's largest Roman museum sits beside the cathedral over an intact Dionysus mosaic, and twelve great Romanesque churches ring the centre — a millennium of piety in stone.

Piety, Cologne-style, comes with a wink. The Kölsch dialect, the Kölsch beer served in slim glasses that never stop arriving, and above all Carnival — the "fifth season", when the city surrenders to costumed madness from November's eleventh minute of the eleventh hour until Ash Wednesday — form a civic religion of cheerful defiance, forged in a city bombed to rubble that rebuilt its humour first.

Musically Köln runs from the medieval to the electronic frontier: the WDR studio here invented electronic music in the 1950s, with Stockhausen as its high priest, while the Gürzenich Orchestra — which premiered Mahler's Fifth and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel — the WDR Symphony, the Kölner Philharmonie under the museum plaza and one of Europe's largest music academies keep the present loud. The Rhine, as always, applauds.