Mannheim

Mannheim abolished street names in its heart: the baroque centre is a grid of squares addressed like chess moves — one lives at C4 or K7 — laid out by Electors who wanted their residence rational. Rationality bred invention with almost comic consistency: Karl Drais rode the first bicycle out of Mannheim in 1817; Carl Benz drove the first automobile through it in 1886; the city considers itself, with justice, the place where individual mobility was born twice.

Music historians bow to a third revolution: the Mannheim School. The Electoral court orchestra of the 1750s--70s, drilled to unprecedented precision, invented the modern orchestra's language — the controlled crescendo that made audiences rise from their seats, the "Mannheim rocket", the dynamic discipline Burney called "an army of generals". Stamitz and his colleagues taught Europe; the young Mozart, visiting repeatedly, absorbed it all and fell in love here besides. German theatre adds its own founding date: Schiller's The Robbers premiered at Mannheim's Nationaltheater in 1782, the scandal that announced a dramatist of world rank — the theatre remains among Germany's most important, with full opera and the country's oldest civic orchestra tradition behind it.

The romanesque-revival water tower presides over Jugendstil gardens; the Popakademie trains Germany's pop musicians — UNESCO lists Mannheim as a City of Music; and the squares keep their chessboard names. Check, as ever, to convention.