Strasbourg's stones record three empires: a Roman legionary camp, a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire, and a border town that changed nationality four times between 1871 and 1945. Three days of crypts, ramparts, Neustadt boulevards and museum archives.
Beneath the Palais Rohan, this museum traces Alsace from 600,000 BC to 800 AD and holds one of France's richest Roman collections — the VIII Augusta legion's Argentoratum camp of 12 BC lies under today's old town. Open 10:00-18:00, closed Tuesday.
The only surviving hall church in Alsace, Lutheran since 1524 and nicknamed the Protestant cathedral. It holds the marble mausoleum of Maréchal Maurice de Saxe, carved 1777, and the 1741 Silbermann organ that Mozart played in 1778.
The cathedral workshop's own museum, set in Gothic and Renaissance houses beside the parvis. It guards the original 13th-century Wise and Foolish Virgins statues, stained glass from around 1070, and the parchment building plans of the cathedral masons.
Three 13th-century defensive towers and bridges guarding the four channels of the Ill, part of the 1230s city wall. The wooden roofs that gave them their name were removed in 1784; the towers later served as prisons and powder stores.
Housed in the 1588 Grande Boucherie slaughterhouse, this museum runs from 1681, when Louis XIV annexed the Free Imperial City, through 1870, 1918, 1940 and 1944. Blondel's 1727 relief plan of the fortified city fills an entire room.
Laid out from 1880 as Kaiserplatz, the monumental heart of the German Neustadt, ringed by the Palais du Rhin, the national library and the theatre. Its centre holds Drago's 1936 memorial: a mother with two dead sons, one French, one German.
Wilhelm I's imperial palace, built 1883-1888 in Italian Renaissance style with a dome modelled on Florence. It housed Reich, then French, then Nazi administrations, and now anchors the UNESCO-listed Neustadt quarter.
Marc Mimram's 2004 twin footbridge over the Rhine to Kehl, opened for a joint Franco-German garden festival on a frontier that shifted four times between 1871 and 1945. The 1960 Europabrücke stands just downstream.
Three linked 16th- and 17th-century houses on the Quai Saint-Nicolas, joined by wooden galleries and stairs, showing Alsatian rural life: painted furniture, ritual objects from the region's village Jewish communities, pharmacy jars and printed saints.
A 1528 courtyard inn where Frederick the Great, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau lodged, its wooden galleries and stair turret restored in 2009 after decades as slum housing. Named for the raven cage in which thieves were once displayed.
Cellars dug in 1395 beneath the civil hospital, where patients once settled their bills in wine. Among some 1,000 oak casks sits a barrel filled in 1472 — the oldest wine still in barrel anywhere, poured only three times, most recently in 1944.
A Protestant church built over a 7th-century Merovingian burial crypt, with an 11th-century cloister and a rood screen of about 1500 carrying restored 14th-century frescoes. Catholics and Protestants shared it under the 1683 simultaneum.