Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Where it sits. Rothenburg ob der Tauber sits on a plateau above a bend of the river Tauber in Middle Franconia, in the Ansbach district of Bavaria, at roughly the midpoint of the Romantic Road. The name means the red castle above the Tauber. The old town is a compact oval enclosed by a complete circuit of walls and towers, about 3.4 kilometres around, with the valley falling away sharply on the western side — which is why the Burggarten, laid out on the site of the Hohenstaufen castle destroyed by an earthquake in 1356, gives such a long view over meadows, orchards and the double bridge below.

The story behind it. A castle stood here from 1070; the town was founded around 1170 beside it, and Rothenburg was a free imperial city from the late Middle Ages until 1803, self-governing and prosperous. Then it stopped growing. Two centuries of quiet poverty left the walls, towers and gabled houses untouched, and by the nineteenth century Romantic painters and early tourists had rediscovered the town as a picture of medieval Germany. The most famous local story, the Meistertrunk, dates from that era of rediscovery rather than from history: it holds that in 1631 the imperial general Tilly agreed to spare the town if a councillor could drain a three-and-a-quarter-litre tankard of wine in one draught, which the former mayor Nusch duly did. The town has re-enacted it at Whitsun ever since, and mechanical figures on the Ratstrinkstube gable perform it several times a day.

On screen. Rothenburg's screen credits are mostly fantasy, which fits. It provided the Vulgarian village in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) — the streets Caractacus Potts and the children run through, with Neuschwanstein standing in for Baron Bomburst's castle in the same film. Earlier and more consequentially, the illustrator Gustaf Tenggren based the village in Disney's Pinocchio (1940) on photographs and drawings of this town, which is a large part of why generations of viewers find the real place uncannily familiar. It is also routinely and wrongly identified as the town seen from the flying glass elevator at the end of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971); that aerial footage was shot over Nördlingen, 60 kilometres to the southeast. The town loosely inspired the fictional Lebensbaum in the video game Shadow of Memories.

What you actually see today. The most photographed corner in Germany is probably the Plönlein, a small triangular fork where a half-timbered house with a steep roof stands between two gates, the Siebersturm above and the Kobolzeller Tor below. The Rathaus combines a Gothic rear building from about 1250 with a Renaissance front begun in 1572, and its tower can be climbed by a final ladder-like stair to a cramped balcony with the definitive view over the roofs. In St James' Church, Tilman Riemenschneider's Holy Blood Altar, carved between 1501 and 1505 in limewood and left unpainted, is one of the great works of German sculpture; the light through its rear window was designed into the composition. The Medieval Crime Museum is better than its lurid name suggests, a serious collection on legal history. The Käthe Wohlfahrt Christmas shop and its museum trade all year in a permanent December. Every evening the Night Watchman leads a tour in English through the lanes with a lantern and a halberd, and it is genuinely good. The Rödertor on the eastern wall can be climbed for the view back across the roofs, and the Christmas market, the Reiterlesmarkt, has been held on the market square since the fifteenth century.

Getting there and timing. Trains run to Rothenburg via a branch from Steinach, itself on the Würzburg–Ansbach line, and the Romantic Road coach stops here in season. Day visitors arrive from around ten and are gone by five; staying inside the walls converts the town completely, because after the last coach the lanes empty and the wall walk is lit and open. The covered wall walkway is free and can be joined at several towers. Bear in mind what happened on 31 March 1945: sixteen aircraft bombed the town, killing 37 people and destroying around 275 houses, roughly a third of the total, along with over 600 metres of wall. American commanders held back artillery to save the rest, the local commander surrendered against orders, and the reconstruction was funded in large part by donations from around the world — the donors' names are recorded on plaques along the wall walk, which turns a picturesque circuit into something more sober. Cobbles, steps and tower stairs make step-free movement difficult beyond the main streets.