Lutherstadt Wittenberg

Wittenberg is where the modern world got its first pamphlet war. On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses against indulgences — tradition nails them to the Castle Church door, whose bronze successor doors now bear the full text — and the small Elbe university town became the detonator of the Reformation. Everything survives, UNESCO-listed: the Lutherhaus, the former monastery where Luther lived with Katharina von Bora and held forth at table, now the world's largest Reformation museum; Melanchthon's elegant humanist house next door; the town church where Luther preached and Cranach's altar painted the new faith's portrait gallery.

Cranach himself ran his prodigious workshop here — court painter, pharmacist, mayor — and his courtyards still open off the market square, where Luther and Melanchthon stand in bronze before the town hall. The university drew Europe's students for three centuries (literature enrolled Hamlet and Faustus among them, a fair measure of its fame) before merging with Halle.

Modern Wittenberg added an ironic postscript: Hundertwasser rebuilt a concrete school into one of his ecological fantasias, golden onions and uneven floors answering the town's severities. Church music remains the living inheritance — the town church's cantorate, festival days each Reformation season, and the world arriving, as it has for five centuries, to see where one monk's theses went viral.