Frankfurt packs 39 museums into a two-kilometre stretch of Main riverbank, runs an opera house voted Europe's best five times, and hides raw studio collectives behind the banking towers. Three days of Städel Old Masters, MMK video art and Ostend ateliers.
Seven centuries of European art from Botticelli and Vermeer to Kirchner, plus a sunken garden wing lit by 195 circular skylights. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, Thu to 21:00. Skip the queue by booking the timed online ticket the night before.
Oswald Mathias Ungers gutted a 19th-century villa and built a white 'house within a house' inside it — architecture theory made physical. The permanent hall traces shelter from hut to skyscraper in 25 large models.
Hans Hollein's wedge-shaped postmodern block, nicknamed 'the slice of cake', holds Warhol, Lichtenstein and Kippenberger alongside room-filling installations. Wed opens late to 19:00; last Saturday of the month is free entry.
The museum's satellite occupies two floors of a banking tower on Taunustor, showing single-artist positions against floor-to-ceiling glass and the Bankenviertel beyond. Small, sharp, and almost always empty.
A neo-Renaissance villa holding 5,000 years of sculpture — Egyptian, Greek, medieval and Baroque — with a walled garden of statues. The polychrome reconstructions show how gaudily painted classical marble actually was.
Rebuilt from the 1944 ruin and reopened in 1981 as a concert hall, its Renaissance-revival facade still carries Goethe's 'Dem Wahren, Schönen, Guten'. The box office in the foyer sells same-evening seats from around €20.
Hands-on history of the moving image: praxinoscopes, a working Lumière cinématographe replica, and a small cinema screening restored prints daily. The second-floor sound stage lets you re-dub a scene yourself.
Repeatedly voted Opera House of the Year by Opernwelt critics, the company mixes Handel rarities with new commissions in a plain 1960s hall with famously exact acoustics. Standing places go on sale one hour before curtain.
Three riverside villas holding 67,000 ethnographic objects, but the curatorial line is unusual: contemporary artists are invited to re-read the colonial-era collection and their responses hang beside it.
A 1954 covered market with 60 traders — Handkäse, Frankfurter Grüne Soße herbs, and a first-floor wine balcony where locals drink Rheingau Riesling standing up from 11:00. Closed Sundays; loudest and best before 13:00.
A late-Gothic merchant's house on the Römerberg edge running experimental group shows on art, science and technology — no permanent collection, so the building changes character entirely every few months.
Germany's largest artist-studio house: 150 painters, sculptors and designers in a former customs building near the ECB, with an open ground-floor gallery and regular Rundgang open-studio evenings.