Plönlein

The Plönlein is barely a square at all — just a small, slightly sloping triangle where a street in Rothenburg ob der Tauber splits in two — yet it has become the single most recognisable view of medieval Germany. A narrow half-timbered house stands at the fork like the prow of a ship. To its left the cobbled Spitalgasse climbs gently to the tall Siebersturm, a gate tower of the town walls; to the right the Kobolzeller Steige drops steeply towards a second gate, the Kobolzeller Tor, and the Tauber valley below. Timber-framed houses crowding the fork complete a scene that has appeared on countless postcards, calendars and jigsaw puzzles.

The name comes from the Latin "planellum", a small level place, and the spot once served as a landing place for fish. Its picture-book composition is the product of the town's growth. Rothenburg received town rights from Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1172, and when the first ring of walls became too tight, the citizens began a second, much larger circuit in 1204; the Kobolzeller gate and the Siebers tower both belong to that phase. Early in the fourteenth century the hospital quarter to the south was taken inside a further extension of the walls, which is why the Siebersturm today stands within the town rather than at its edge, framing the view up the lane.

From 1274 until 1803 Rothenburg was a free imperial city. After the Thirty Years' War its importance faded, and slow growth in the following centuries left the old townscape largely intact, and abroad it came to be seen as the prototype of a medieval German town. Allied bombing on 31 March 1945 destroyed roughly a third of the houses, mostly in the eastern part of the old town, which was rebuilt afterwards; the US Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, aware of the town's beauty, asked that it be spared artillery fire, and the local commander surrendered it in April. The Romantic Road, founded in 1950, runs through the town, and the illustrator Gustaf Tenggren drew on images of Rothenburg for the village in Disney's Pinocchio.

Getting there

The Plönlein is in the southern part of the walled old town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Bavaria. Rothenburg station, at the end of a branch line from Steinach on the Würzburg–Ansbach railway, is in the town, and the A7 motorway passes close by. Nuremberg Airport (NUE) is about 67 km away in a straight line.