Rosenheim

Rosenheim looks like Italy and thinks like Bavaria. Its old town is a showpiece of the Inn-Salzach manner — arcaded streets, façades in ochre, rose and green rising to straight parapets that hide the roofs — the architecture that river trade carried up the Inn from the south, so that Max-Josefs-Platz reads like a Lombard piazza with pretzels. The style is honest advertising: for centuries Rosenheim lived from the Inn shipping and the salt road, its merchants warehousing the white gold between Hall, the river and Munich.

The city's landmark exhibitions now occupy the Lokschuppen, a former locomotive roundhouse turned one of Germany's most successful exhibition halls, whose annual blockbuster shows — pharaohs, Vikings, rainforests — draw hundreds of thousands; the Inn Museum by the river keeps the older story of flatboats and floods, and the wood technology tradition of the local university of applied sciences carries the timber trade into the laboratory age. Television, meanwhile, made the town a household name: the gentle procedurals of the "Rosenheim-Cops" have broadcast its gables across the German-speaking world for two decades.

The setting seals it. The Alps stand a quarter-hour to the south, the Chiemsee glitters to the east, the Mangfall and Inn meet at the town's edge — Rosenheim is the practical, prosperous gateway where Munich's plain ends and the mountains' promise begins, with a cappuccino served under arcades either way.