Munich carries 860 years in layers: a monk settlement turned Wittelsbach residence, then the birthplace of the Nazi party and the city that now documents it hardest. Three days trace all of it, from Aegina pediments to a 1972 memorial.
Ludwig I's 1830 temple-fronted museum holds only ancient sculpture — the Aegina temple pediments, the Barberini Faun, Roman portrait busts — in bare brick halls deliberately left unplastered after 1944 bomb damage. Open 10:00–17:00, Thu to 20:00.
Munich's oldest parish church sits on the Petersbergl mound where monks lived before the 1158 city charter. 306 wooden steps pass the bell chamber to a balcony over the Altstadt; inside lies the jewelled skeleton of St Munditia.
The first Wittelsbach fortress, built around 1253 and later the imperial seat of Ludwig the Bavarian. The Affenturm corner tower and the Gothic bay window survive; the free vaulted-cellar museum explains the castle with models and excavated fragments.
Built in just 20 years from 1468 in red brick because Munich had no stone quarry, its twin 99m towers got their copper onion domes in 1525. The nave columns hide the windows from one spot at the entrance — the origin of the Devil's Footstep legend.
A white cube built in 2015 on the footprint of the Brown House, the Nazi party headquarters. Four floors track Munich's role as Hauptstadt der Bewegung from 1918 street violence to post-war silence, told through documents rather than objects.
The 1844 loggia where police stopped the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, killing 16 marchers. Under the Nazis an SS guard forced passers-by to salute here; the bronze cobblestone trail in the alley behind marks the route people took to dodge it.
In the university's light-well atrium, bronze leaflets are set into the floor where Sophie and Hans Scholl threw theirs from the gallery on 18 February 1943. They were arrested minutes later and beheaded four days after. A small room documents the group.
Where the 1923 putsch began and where carpenter Georg Elser hid a bomb in a pillar in 1939, missing Hitler by 13 minutes. The hall was demolished in 1979; a floor plaque by the Gasteig and a steel outline of Elser's profile mark the spot.
Begun in 1664 to celebrate the birth of an heir, the summer palace stretches 632m along its canal. The Gallery of Beauties holds 36 portraits Ludwig I commissioned, including dancer Lola Montez, whose affair cost him the throne in 1848.
A grass-covered cut in the Olympiapark hillside opened in 2017 for the 11 Israeli team members and the German officer killed in the September 1972 hostage attack. A long screen inside runs footage from the days the Games were suspended.
An 18.5m bronze woman cast in 1850 by Ferdinand von Miller, the first colossal bronze since antiquity. A spiral staircase inside her body climbs to viewing slits in her head; behind stands Ludwig I's Doric hall of 80 Bavarian busts.
East of the Isar, Preysingstraße and Kirchenstraße keep the single-storey Herbergen cottages built for day labourers who were barred from the walled city. The grid north of them was named after 1870-71 battlefields when Haidhausen was absorbed in 1854.