München

München insists that paradise is administrable: beer gardens under chestnuts, the Alps on the horizon, surfers riding the Eisbach wave in the English Garden, and an art-and-music infrastructure of imperial scale — all run with Bavarian thoroughness. The Wittelsbachs, who ruled a thousand years, built the stage set: the Residenz's treasure chambers, the Frauenkirche's onion domes, and the three Pinakothek galleries whose Old Masters, from Dürer's self-portrait to Rubens's walls, form one of Europe's supreme collections, extended by the Lenbachhaus's Blue Rider horsemen — Kandinsky and Marc invented abstraction in this city.

Musical Munich is Wagner's proving ground: King Ludwig II's patronage gave the Nationaltheater the world premieres of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, and the Bavarian State Opera remains among the two or three most admired houses on earth, its summer festival a pilgrimage. Richard Strauss, born here to a court horn player, returned as the city's musical patron saint; today the Bavarian Radio Symphony — regularly ranked among the world's finest orchestras — the Munich Philharmonic in the Gasteig and the Herkulessaal divide an embarrassment of riches.

And once a year the city drops its baton for the Wiesn: Oktoberfest, the planet's largest folk festival, six million guests in tents the size of cathedrals. Munich sees no contradiction — Gemütlichkeit, too, is a fine art.