Old Town Hall, Bamberg

Bamberg's Old Town Hall does not stand on a square or a street but in the middle of a river. Set on an island in the left arm of the Regnitz, it sits exactly between the two historic halves of the town, the hill town once ruled by the prince-bishops and the island town of the burghers, and it is reached by two bridges: the Obere Brücke runs straight through it, while the Untere Brücke passes alongside. Local legend says the citizens built it here because the bishop refused them land, so they drove piles into the river and made their own ground. Historians point out that the real boundary lay elsewhere and that the site more likely joined the two civic districts, but the story has stuck to the building for centuries.

The town hall is first recorded in 1387 and took its present form in a Gothic rebuilding between 1461 and 1467. Between 1744 and 1756 the architect Johann Jakob Michael Küchel remodelled it in Baroque and Rococo style. In 1755 the painter Johann Anwander covered both long sides with illusionistic frescoes of allegorical scenes and painted architecture. After the paintings had faded almost completely, Anton Greiner repainted them between 1959 and 1962. On the eastern side the trompe-l'oeil goes a step further: a carved leg of a putto actually projects from the wall, so that a painted figure seems to step out of the plaster. Rococo balconies and coats of arms by the sculptor Joseph Bonaventura Mutschele complete the facades. At the upstream end, perched on the bridge's icebreaker, clings the Rottmeisterhaus, a three-storey half-timbered house of 1668 that lodged the commanders of the bridge guard.

Inside, the upper floor holds a Rococo hall with stucco by Franz Jakob Vogel (1745), carvings by Mutschele and oil paintings by Anwander that illustrate the four cardinal virtues with Old Testament scenes, a reminder to the councillors who once sat beneath them. The German Red Cross was founded in this hall in 1921. Since 1995 the building has housed the Ludwig Collection, one of Europe's largest private collections of porcelain and Strasbourg faience. Bamberg, a Franconian town of about 79,000 people spread across seven church-crowned hills near the meeting of the Regnitz and the Main, has an old town of medieval streets and some 2,400 timber-framed houses that has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993; the town hall on its river island is its best-known image.

Getting there

The Old Town Hall stands in the heart of Bamberg's old town, on the Obere Brücke between the island town and the hill town. Bamberg station lies on the main railway line to Nuremberg, about 63 km away by rail. The nearest airport is Nuremberg Airport (NUE), about 46 km to the south in a straight line.