Ravensburg

Ravensburg made its first fortune in linen and paper, and its second in play. The medieval trading city — whose Great Ravensburg Trading Company of the fifteenth century ran offices from Barcelona to Kraków, Upper Swabia's answer to the Fuggers — kept its skyline of towers so complete that it is called the "Swabian town of towers": the flour-sack-round Mehlsack, the Blaserturm's watchman gallery, gate after gate above gabled streets that war never touched. Paper mills on the Schussen ground the rags of that commerce; five centuries later the same tradition of paper and precision produced the puzzle: Ravensburger, founded here in 1883, grew into Europe's great house of jigsaw puzzles and board games, its blue triangle known in every nursery — and the Museum Ravensburger plus a family theme park nearby let visitors walk into the game box.

The town's year peaks in the Rutenfest each July, the historic children's and marksmen's festival whose drum corps, parades and crossbow shooting have marked Ravensburg childhoods for centuries — an institution locals rank somewhere above Christmas.

Between towers, the Konzerthaus of 1897 — a neo-baroque jewel — hosts the concert season, and Weingarten's mighty baroque basilica with its famous organ lies a bus ride away. Trade, towers and thirty-six-thousand-piece patience: Ravensburg assembled itself well.