Munich

Munich is the capital of a Bavaria that thinks of itself as a country, and it lives like one: an old town of onion-domed towers around Marienplatz, where the town-hall carillon plays at eleven; the Englischer Garten, larger than Central Park, where surfers ride a standing wave on the Eisbach all year and a thousand chairs stand under the chestnuts by the Chinese Tower; the beer gardens, where you bring the food and buy the litre; the palace of Nymphenburg; the tent-roofed Olympiapark of 1972; and, on days when the föhn wind clears the air, the Alps standing at the end of the street. In late September the Theresienwiese fills with the Oktoberfest, as it has since a royal wedding in 1810.

The traveller stands on Marienplatz at eleven; climbs a church tower for the domes and the mountains; eats a Weisswurst before noon at the Viktualienmarkt, as the rule requires; watches the surfers on the Eisbach and walks the garden to the Chinese Tower for the first litre; visits the Alte Pinakothek for the Dürers, or the Deutsches Museum for the machines; takes the S-Bahn to Nymphenburg's palace and swans; crosses the Isar to the taverns of Haidhausen; and gives a morning to Dachau, twenty minutes away, where the first camp of the regime is kept as a memorial that Munich itself asks you to see.

The Guide's honesty: Oktoberfest is enormous, joyful and expensive, and hotel prices triple — book a year ahead or come for the beer gardens in June, which are the same pleasure without the crowd —; the city is safe, orderly and shuts its kitchens early by southern standards; the public transport is superb and the day ticket is the bargain; the föhn gives headaches and postcards in equal measure; and the memorial at Dachau is not an optional excursion but part of the city's own honesty about itself, and the visitor who goes understands Munich better.