Mühldorf am Inn

Mühldorf am Inn wears Italy on a Bavarian river: its long, arcaded town square — houses in ochre, rose and cream behind continuous vaulted walkways, façades hiding their roofs behind straight Inn-Salzach parapets — belongs to the family of "Italian" townscapes that the salt trade built along the Inn, sisters to Wasserburg and Burghausen. For eight centuries the town was a Salzburg enclave in Bavaria: the archbishops held Mühldorf as their western outpost until Napoleon's reshuffling, and the ecclesiastical centuries left their polish on square, towers and the frescoed Lodronhaus.

History chose the meadows outside town for a resonant date: the Battle of Mühldorf, 1322, where Ludwig the Bavarian defeated his Habsburg rival for the imperial crown — remembered as one of the last great knightly battles fought without firearms, chivalry's twilight staged on the Inn plain. The town's darker twentieth-century chapter, the forced-labour camp complex of the war's end, is confronted in a memorial landscape that Mühldorf maintains with sober care.

Today the district capital lives from its markets, its rail junction and its river landscapes; the cultural season fills the Stadtsaal and the Haberkasten's historic granary halls with concerts and cabaret, and the arcades fill, as for eight hundred years, with unhurried commerce. (This entry merges the duplicate records "Mühldorf" and "Mühldorf am Inn".)