Worms

Worms is where the Nibelungs feasted and Luther stood firm — legend and conscience sharing one small Rhine city. The medieval epic seats Siegfried, Kriemhild and the treacherous Hagen at the Burgundian court of Worms; the city returns the compliment with the Nibelungen Museum built into its town wall and the Nibelungen Festival, staging the saga each summer against the floodlit cathedral. That cathedral — St Peter's, twelfth-century, one of the three great Romanesque imperial cathedrals of the Rhine with Speyer and Mainz — witnessed the historical scene that outgrew the legend: before the Diet of Worms in 1521, Martin Luther refused to recant, and Europe's religious unity ended in a sentence. The Luther Monument, the world's largest Reformation memorial, gathers the whole cast in bronze.

A third inheritance is older than both: Worms's Jewish community, among Europe's earliest, made the city a medieval "Jerusalem on the Rhine"; the rebuilt Rashi synagogue, the mikveh and the Holy Sand — the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe, its tilted stones a thousand years deep — are UNESCO World Heritage as part of the ShUM cities.

And the vineyards close the circle: the Liebfrauenkirche's surrounding vines gave the world Liebfraumilch, while today's Worms pours far better. Epic, conscience, prayer and Riesling — few cities of its size carry more of Europe's memory.