Ludwigsburg

Ludwigsburg was built to out-Versailles everyone: Duke Eberhard Ludwig's residence, begun 1704, grew into Germany's largest intact baroque palace — eighteen buildings, 452 rooms around courtyards of ducal geometry — with a planned town laid out at its feet like a parade. The palace survives unmodernised to a rare degree: original apartments, the exquisite palace theatre with working baroque stage machinery, galleries of porcelain and painting — while "Blooming Baroque", the garden ensemble around it, adds a fairy-tale garden whose Rapunzel tower and dragons have enchanted Swabian childhoods since 1959. Two satellite pleasure palaces, Favorite and the lakeside Monrepos, complete the ducal daydream.

The court bred talents it could not hold: Friedrich Schiller passed his schooldays under the duke's stern academy nearby; the poet Eduard Mörike and the theologian-rebel David Friedrich Strauss were born in the town; and Ludwigsburg porcelain, the duke's own manufactory, still fires its wares.

Music claims the palace every summer: the Ludwigsburg Schlossfestspiele, founded 1932 as one of Germany's earliest festivals, fills the Ordenssaal, courtyards and gardens with orchestras, opera and dance of international rank. Add the film academy that trains German cinema's next generations and the market square's twin churches facing each other in confessional symmetry, and Ludwigsburg remains what its founder intended — a stage, still perfectly lit.