Heidelberg

A wooden vat in the cellar holds over 200,000 litres and has been filled just a few times. A dance floor was laid across its top. It burned twice, and after lightning struck in 1764 nobody rebuilt it. A funicular from the town does the climb.

A bronze monkey holding a mirror sits at the town end, with mice beside it. Touching the mirror is supposed to bring you back, so that patch is rubbed bright. The two towers on the bridge gate once held prisoners.

The climb from the north bank is a narrow stair, and the first ten minutes are the steepest. The slope faces south and holds sun through winter, so its almond trees flower early. The view taking in castle and bridge is halfway along, not at the start.

The walls are packed with names and inked profiles left by students. They were shut in here between 1778 and 1914, and still went to lectures while serving time. That turned a sentence into a boast, and some are said to have earned it on purpose.

The Manesse manuscript came back from Paris in 1888 and lies open in a case in the exhibition room. That room charges nothing, though the page on show is turned every few months to spare it the light.

A wall once ran through the church, splitting it between Catholics and Protestants. Two confessions shared the one roof that way for two hundred and thirty years from 1706. The line is still readable in the floor, and small shops fill the arches outside.

The line runs in two sections, new cars below and wooden ones built in 1907 above. The upper stretch still works those same carriages. You change at the castle, and a single through ticket beats buying two.

From Bismarckplatz to the Karlstor, 1.6 kilometres run without cars, which puts it among the longer pedestrian streets in Europe. Walking it both ways empties your legs, so ride a tram to one end and come back on foot.

The university opened in 1386, the oldest inside present-day Germany. The old hall facing the square was redone in 1886. Scenes from the university's past cover its walls, which makes it look less like a lecture room than a gallery.

A long strip of grass on the north bank fills with students on warm evenings once the season turns. Grilling is allowed only in a marked section, and glass bottles are kept out.

An open-air assembly ground the Nazis built in 1935 on the Heiligenberg north of the Neckar, stone tiers filling the slope in a half circle. Ruins of the medieval St Michael's monastery crown the top. A forest path climbs on where the Philosophers' Walk stops.

Elector Carl Theodor's summer palace, close to Heidelberg by train. In the vast garden stands a red mosque building dating to the late 1700s. In the trompe l'oeil called the End of the World, a landscape painted past an arch passes for distant fields.

A village reached by the boats that run up the Neckar from Heidelberg, with four medieval castles strung out on the wooded crest over the river. A forest trail links them, so all four can be visited on foot. For the return, the train is an option.

A Romanesque cathedral consecrated in 1061 at Speyer on the Rhine, west of Heidelberg, and a World Heritage site. Eight emperors and kings lie in its crypt. A viewing platform up the stairs of the southwest tower overlooks the Rhine plain.