Book Frankfurt attraction tickets

Frankfurt occupies a peculiar position in the European imagination. It is simultaneously Germany's financial capital, home to the European Central Bank and a skyline that looks borrowed from Chicago, and a city with a medieval old town painstakingly reconstructed after wartime destruction. That tension between the ancient and the aggressively modern is not incidental to Frankfurt; it is the whole point of the place.

The Römerberg, the cobbled square at the centre of the Altstadt, is where that reconstruction is most visible and most affecting. The half-timbered facades that line it were rebuilt in the 1980s following the near-total devastation of the Second World War, yet the square still functions as Frankfurt has always intended it to: as a civic gathering place, framed by the old town hall complex from which the city takes its name in local parlance. A short walk south brings you to the Museumsufer, the string of museums running along the south bank of the Main, which includes the Städel, one of the most significant art collections in the German-speaking world. The river itself divides the city cleanly, with Sachsenhausen on the southern bank offering a denser concentration of traditional apple-wine taverns than almost anywhere else in Hesse.