The Old Town Hall in Bamberg straddles the River Regnitz This autumn\'s Hollywood swashbuckler,The Three Musketeers, is being prepared for release next month. It stars Orlando Bloom and Milla Jovovich and, despite being a carefully detailed period piece , was made partly on location. These days most productions are made in studios and in creative directors\' imaginations, but in this case the directors wanted a perfect slice of the 17th century, and they found it in Germany.
This setting will come as a surprise to some readers. Business travellers, for example, who only deal in big cities, could be forgiven for thinking that there\'s little of real period value left in a nation that ended up on the rough end of two world wars. Downtown city centres were certainly \"re-designed\" by Allied bombers, so business travellers tend to emerge from the hotel, peer down the main street, harrumph and head back to the airport. But venture a little farther, dig a little deeper, and they\'d discover the Germany that provided that authentic backdrop to the Musketeers: a cobblestoned, half-timbered Germany where the medieval and the baroque live cheek by jowl, where old traditions are maintained and where not a lot has changed since the days when emperors and their entourages would take up residence for the season.
Two of the best examples of this history in action are the Franconian double act, Bamberg and Nuremberg, two cities that developed pretty much in parallel over the centuries but which have very different recent pasts. Both have, in their time, been associated with the concept of being the \"most German of German cities\", an idea that came to have unfortunate associations, more of which later.
Franconia may sound Frenchified and musketeery but is, in fact, the northern part of Bavaria, a peaceful landscape of impressionistic swirls, whorls and patches, of spidery rural villages sitting in webs of hill-topping woodland. As a landscape, it isn\'t as spectacular as the rugged peaks and steep alpine meadows that attract the crowds to southern Bavaria, but here it is the cities, with their long and colourful histories, that are the main attraction. For this was once the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, and the emperors were keen to ensure their home towns were suitably splendid.
Bamberg is the most immaculate of them all, something Unesco spotted some 18 years ago when the city was first designated a World Heritage Site, and this is where a substantial chunk of The Three Musketeers has been filmed. Fortunately, the world wars passed the city by and there are some 2,500 protected medieval buildings still standing.
Furthermore, this is a city still divided along medieval lines, with the Imperial Residence, the 12th-century cathedral and the nobles district up on a hill overlooking a large island between two arms of the River Regnitz. The cathedral (Romanesque, but with Gothic additions) sits on the edge of a giant cobbled square - the only cathedral outside the Vatican to still contain the tomb of a Pope (he asked to have his remains interred here). Lining the other side of the square is the Residenz and its adjoining rose garden, where the emperor would wander out to escape the attentions of courtiers and supplicants and gaze out from the balustrade across the rooftops of his city.
Most of those roofs belonged to the more impoverished dwellings situated on Bamberg\'s island, where the more plebeian commercial and market district was located. Here, the riverbanks are still lined with what is now known as Little Venice - wonky, half-timbered fishermen\'s houses right by the water\'s edge, once ramshackle and poor but now extremely desirable properties. These days there are no more fishermen but boat cruises instead, including actual gondolas from Venice.
The river crossing between the imperial and the plebeian part of the city is the most attractive bit of Bamberg. The Old Town Hall straddles the crossing on its own little island, blushing with frescos and frilly with rococo balconies, its bridges flowing with a babel of languages from all the visitors off the cruise boats that stop here in transit between the Rhine and the Danube. Terraces of cafes sprawl out across the cobbles, with customers getting stuck into traditional beef and dumplings and coffee and cake of the sort that, once past your lips, remains forever on your hips.