Neuwied

Neuwied was built on tolerance and furnished the courts of Europe. The counts of Wied founded their Rhine-bank residence in 1653 with an offer rare for the age: freedom of conscience for all who would settle — and they came: Mennonites, Moravian Brethren with their prayer hall and tranquil God's Acre cemetery, Jews, Huguenots and sects without a name elsewhere, each community building its quarter in the planned grid between Schloss and river. The Moravian quarter survives as the town's most atmospheric corner, plain facades hiding the old pietist order.

Among the settlers were the Roentgens: Abraham and his son David Roentgen made Neuwied the address of Europe's most celebrated furniture workshop — marquetry pictures in wood, mechanical desks whose secret drawers unfolded at a touch, delivered to Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great; museums from the Louvre to the Hermitage treasure the Neuwied signature, and the local Roentgen Museum keeps masterpieces at the source, alongside the Kinzing clocks that ticked inside them.

The Rhine remains the town's broad boulevard — the Deichstadt lives behind its protective dike-promenade — with Schloss Engers downstream, a Baroque pleasure palace now housing the Villa Musica foundation's academy, its frescoed hall a chamber-music jewel of the Middle Rhine's calendar. The zoo on the heights, Roman Limes traces and the Westerwald behind complete the picture: a town that tolerated its way to craftsmanship and music.