Lübeck

A route that fits on an island: the old town between the Trave and the canal is about two kilometres long and up to one wide, with the Holsten Gate, St Mary's, the cathedral, the town hall and the salt warehouses close together. From 1361 Lübeck led the Hanseatic League; the surviving old town has been UNESCO World Heritage since 1987.

Lübeck was an experiment. On the night before Palm Sunday, 29 March 1942, 234 British bombers dropped some 400 tonnes, two thirds of it about 25,000 incendiaries. 320 people died and 1,468 buildings were destroyed outright, roughly a fifth of the medieval old town. Arthur Harris picked it because it was small, dense and timber-built — a trial run for larger targets.

The Holsten Gate of 1464 to 1478 began sinking into the soft ground during construction; in 1863 the vote against demolishing it carried by one. St Mary's has the highest brick vault in the world at 38.5 metres; the bells that fell in 1942 have lain untouched in the south tower ever since. The salt warehouses of 1579 to 1745 were a set for Nosferatu in 1922. Thomas Mann took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, Günter Grass in 1999; their two houses are a few minutes apart.