Schwetzingen

Schwetzingen is a garden with a town attached, and the garden is one of Europe's great ones. The Electors Palatine made this their summer residence, and behind the modest pink palace laid out pleasure grounds that graduate from French circle-parterre to English landscape, strewn with follies of philosophic wit: a mosque with minarets — the garden mosque as Enlightenment gesture, the largest of its kind — a temple of Apollo, a "ruined" Roman aqueduct, and the illusionistic "End of the World" perspective painting that closes one alley with painted infinity. Court society here heard the future: the young Mozart performed at the palace in 1763, and the Mannheim orchestra's summer seasons filled these rooms with the newest style.

That inheritance found its perfect modern form: the Schwetzingen Festival, founded in 1952 by the broadcaster SWR, stages each May and June a season of opera premieres, chamber music and recitals in the palace's Rococo Theatre — one of Europe's most enchanting surviving eighteenth-century court theatres — and the festival's dozens of commissioned world premieres have made this small town a genuine address in opera history.

Schwetzingen's earthlier festival is edible: as self-proclaimed asparagus capital of the world, the town celebrates the white spears each spring with markets and ceremony. Spargel and Salieri premieres, minarets and Mozart: the Electors would recognise their garden's spirit exactly.