Marburg, Germany: a fairy-tale university town of Gothic spires above the Lahn

The Brothers Grimm studied in Marburg in the early nineteenth century and gathered some of their fairy tales in the surrounding hills, and the town still looks the part: a labyrinth of stepped cobbled lanes and leaning half-timbered houses climbing the Schlossberg, crowned by a landgraves' castle and anchored below by one of Germany's first Gothic churches. A Hessian town of about 76,000 people on the river Lahn - a quarter of them students - Marburg sits roughly 90 kilometres north of Frankfurt and about the same distance south of Kassel, midway between the two.

The Elisabethkirche, built between 1235 and 1283, is among the earliest purely Gothic churches north of the Alps and is said to have influenced the design of Cologne Cathedral. It rose over the grave of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the young widowed landgravine who spent her last years here nursing the sick and died in 1231, aged just twenty-four.

Castle on the hill, colloquy in its halls

High above stands the Landgrafenschloss, begun as an eleventh-century fort and extended into a Gothic residence whose Knights' Hall and chapel date from the late thirteenth century. In 1527 Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous founded here the world's first Protestant university, and two years later he gathered Luther and Zwingli in the castle for the Marburg Colloquy, an attempt to reconcile the two wings of the Reformation.

An upper town made for wandering

Spared heavy wartime damage and barely altered between 1600 and 1850, Marburg keeps an unusually complete Oberstadt, or upper town, reached by stairways and even by public lifts built into the hillside. A "Grimm Path" of sculptures threads the lanes with figures from the tales, and from the castle terraces the view runs out over the spires and red roofs to the wooded Lahn valley beyond.