Nürnberg

Nürnberg was the Holy Roman Empire's unofficial capital and the German Renaissance's workshop. Beneath the Kaiserburg, where emperors kept their regalia, Albrecht Dürer painted the first true self-portraits of European art — his house by the castle gate still shows his world — while the city's craftsmen produced the first pocket watches, the first globe still in existence (Behaim's, 1492, made before Columbus returned), and toys that made "Nuremberg ware" a byword; the toy museum and the world's most famous Christkindlesmarkt, opened each Advent by the golden-robed Christkind, continue the line, bratwurst smoke included.

Music history granted the city an opera of its own: Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg immortalised the real guild of singing craftsmen and their real cobbler-poet Hans Sachs, whose statue stands near his church — no other city is itself the hero of a great opera. The twentieth century then made Nürnberg carry history's heaviest names: the Nazi rallies staged here, and the Nuremberg Trials that answered them, established in Courtroom 600 — preserved as a memorial — the principle that states' crimes have individual authors.

The rebuilt old town within its intact walls, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum — the German-speaking world's largest museum of culture — the Staatstheater's opera and the Nürnberg Symphony carry the double inheritance with open eyes. Dürer's city looks at everything directly; that is its art.