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Few German cities carry their mythology as lightly as Heidelberg. The old town sits in a narrow valley where the Neckar River cuts through the wooded hills of the Odenwald, and the ruined castle above it has been drawing romantics, scholars, and painters since the eighteenth century. Goethe came here. Mark Twain wrote about it at length in A Tramp Abroad, half-mockingly, half-enchanted. The university, founded in 1386, is the oldest in Germany, and its presence still shapes the character of the place: the streets around the Hauptstrasse and the Marktplatz fill with students, and the city has an intellectual restlessness that sits alongside its considerable beauty without any apparent contradiction.

The castle is the obvious starting point for understanding Heidelberg, though it rewards more than a single glance from the Alte Brucke below. The red sandstone walls, partially blown apart by French troops in the late seventeenth century and never fully rebuilt, have a quality that finished monuments rarely achieve. The ruin is more expressive than the complete building would have been. From the Schlossgarten and the Stückgarten terraces, the view down over the old town and the river is one of the most reproduced in Germany for good reason. The Philosophenweg, the path that climbs the opposite bank of the Neckar through gardens and orchards, offers the reverse angle and a quieter hour away from the main tourist circuits.