Highlights

• Stand above the buried remains of a medieval synagogue and hear how a church was built on top of it — against the wishes of the men who ran the city

• Follow the rise and fall of sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, who went from carving Germany's earliest realistic nudes to being imprisoned and tortured in the fortress above

• Visit the lab where a curious physicist noticed a faint glow in the dark and accidentally changed the course of modern medicine

• Drink Franconian wine on a bridge that took over two centuries to build, from vineyards that have been producing since the eighth century

• Enter a palace designed by a cannon-foundry apprentice with no architectural training, whose ceiling fresco survived the war only because one American soldier refused to let it be lost