Bavaria · Old Town
Nuremberg
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Nuremberg is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Kaiserburg 1,500 points
Everything on this side of the river tilts towards it. Take Burgstraße up and do not stop: it has been the way up since before there was a town at the bottom of it. The last stretch is a real climb, and there is no version of this walk where it is not.
Frauenkirche 500 points
Be standing in front of it at noon. Something up on the gable starts moving, it lasts a couple of minutes, and then it is over for the day. I am not telling you what. Get there early and take the middle of the square, because everyone else works that out too late.
Germanisches Nationalmuseum 500 points
You do not have to go inside for this one. The lane in front of it is lined with tall white pillars, twenty-seven of them in one straight row, and each carries a single sentence in German and in one other language. Read as you walk. It is the only street I know that was built to be taken at walking pace.
Schöner Brunnen 500 points
The tallest thing on the big square, and the only one standing on its own. Gilded stone stacked upward until it runs out, shaped like a spire that mislaid its church. Go right round the back of it. It was made to be read from all sides, and most visitors only ever see one.
St. Lorenz 500 points
Do not come at it sideways. Walk up Karolinenstraße instead and keep your eyes ahead: the whole street was laid out to put this west front at the far end of it, and it works. Then go and stand under the doorway, close enough that you have to tip your head right back.
St. Sebald 500 points
Go round to the east end. The roof over the choir is far steeper and far higher than the roof over the rest, so from down by the river it reads as a second building standing behind the first. A hundred years later they did the same trick on the far bank. Two steep roofs, one river between them.
Albrecht-Dürer-Haus 250 points
It stands at the top of the town, on the little square just inside the old gate, and it is twice the size of anything else standing there. Sandstone below, wood above, and a roof you could store a winter in. Cross the square and look back from the far corner. From underneath you cannot see the half of it.
Egidienplatz 250 points
The high end of the northern half, and the biggest breathing space on the whole walk. Then find the passage through the front on the north side of it. Behind that front is a courtyard with arcades stacked three levels up, put back together stone by stone from photographs. It is not open every day. Worth timing your walk for.
Frauentorturm 250 points
If you arrive by train, this is your front door, and few towns have a better one. Do not photograph it from outside and walk on. Go under it, turn on the spot, and look up at the inside face. Then look at how thick it is where the road goes through.
Freiung 250 points
A wide flat shelf at the top of the climb, which is the only flat thing up here. Nothing was ever built on it and nothing ever will be. Put your back to the stonework, let the ones who took the stairs go past, and give it five minutes. This is the last quiet before the big one.
Salz+Pfeffer 250 points
The only stop on this walk that is not centuries old. It sits outside the wall, on the ring road, in a row nobody photographs, and without the pin you would go straight past. Look for the sign at street level. Then look at what is on this week, because it changes.
Steubenbrücke 250 points
This is as far east as the walk goes, and the only reason to come out here. Stop in the middle and look back west: the river arrives in two separate channels and the town closes up again beyond them. Then turn round and finish it. I do not leave a bridge half eaten.
Tucherschloss 250 points
Out on the quiet edge of the level, behind a high wall, down a lane most visitors never turn into. From the street you get almost nothing: a front, and one oriel leaning out over the pavement. Go in. Behind the building the ground drops away in terraces, and at the bottom of them stands a single Renaissance hall, carried here in pieces and put back together.
Weißer Turm 250 points
Five of the long streets on this half of town bend in and meet at this one point. Stand at its foot and look back down them. The whole plan of the southern half is aimed right here, which is a lot of planning for one lump of masonry to carry.
Name origin
Why it is called Nuremberg.
The oldest form of the name survives in one line of a document from 1050: Nŏrenberc. The end of it is -berc, and there is indeed a berg here, a steep sandstone ridge with a castle sitting on top of it. What the front half of the name meant, I could not tell you. I have been lying on the answer for a thousand years and it has never once come up.
Sources: www.nuernberg.de p. 2, www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
A steep sandstone ridge over the Pegnitz, standing in the middle of a very large amount of royal forest and not much else. The castle went up on the rock, and two farm estates were set up to feed it, one on each bank. The town grew out of the estates. The whole reason for the place was that the empire wanted a hard point this far out, and this rock was the only hard thing for miles. I have views about that rock. All of them are favourable.
Why then
When the first stone went down.
There is a date, and it is oddly precise. On 16 July 1050 the emperor stopped here, held court, and put in writing that a bondswoman named Sigena was free. The last line of that document reads actum Nŏrenberc, done at Nŏrenberc, and that line is the first time this place exists on paper. The town keeps the day as its birthday. Only five documents of that kind survive anywhere in the original. So the birth certificate of Nuremberg is somebody else's release papers.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.nuernberg.de, www.nuernberg.de p. 2, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1050–1219
Kings. The rock up there was an imperial castle before it was anything else, sitting in the middle of a very large block of crown land. Heinrich III moved a market up here from Fürth to keep it fed. His son cut the land around it out of the county it had belonged to and made it a district of the empire in its own right, with its own high court. None of that was about a town. There was barely a town yet.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2, www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de
- 1219–1427
The citizens, in instalments, and every instalment is a document. In 1219 Friedrich II gave them a charter that put them under the king's protection alone and handed them advantages on coinage and tolls. The council is in the records by 1256. In 1356 the Golden Bull made this the town where every newly elected king had to hold his first assembly, which set Nuremberg beside Frankfurt and Aachen in the working of the empire. In 1424 the imperial regalia were sent here for keeping, and here they stayed until 1796. By 1427 the council had bought out what the burgraves still held. Two hundred years of paperwork, which is roughly my pace.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.nuernberg.de
- 1427–1806
The council, on its own, for close to four hundred years. Outside the walls it ran about 1,200 square kilometres of countryside, the largest land territory any imperial city ever held. Inside them the same families held the same seats: five ranks, strictly separated, sealed shut by a statute in 1521. Nuremberg was the first imperial city to bring in the Reformation, in 1525. After that the money thinned out, the rules did not, and the debts grew.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de
- 1806–
Bavaria. In September 1806 the new king of Bavaria took the imperial city, four years after it had slipped through the settlement that swallowed most of the others. Then, in 1835, the first railway in Germany ran from here to Fürth. The market had come up from Fürth nearly eight hundred years before that. I like a town that returns a favour eventually.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de, www.nuernberg.de
The emblem
What the shield means.
The shield is split down the middle. On one half, half a black eagle on gold, cut off at the split. On the other, red and silver running diagonally. The icon shows the eagle whole, because half a bird beside a set of stripes is not something anyone can pick out at this size. Both halves say the same thing anyway: this town answered to the head of the empire and to nobody in between.
Sources: de.wikipedia.org, www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The belt of wall, towers and ditches around this Old Town is the best preserved of any large city in Europe. The last ring was closed in 1452 and it has held its shape since. The heritage record is blunt about the tall gate towers in it: worthless for defence. They were given their stone jackets in the sixteenth century because a town that looked like this was making a claim, and a claim outlasts a wall.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 4, www.nuernberg.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 3
From the fifteenth century a strict building code told this town what a house had to be: stone, eaves side to the street, no jutting upper storeys, ridge heights and roof tiles prescribed. Timber framing was generally not allowed and never quite died out. That left the showing off exactly two places to go. Into the courtyards behind the fronts, where nobody walking past can see it. And into the one thing a house was allowed to lean out over the lane: a small oriel, called a Chörlein here. Count them as you go.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 4
This is two towns inside one wall. North of the river the older half grew up under the castle and follows the contour lines, so its lanes bend with the hill. South of it the Staufer laid out a new half to a plan: Adlerstraße, Karolinenstraße, Brunnengasse, Breite Gasse and Frauengasse run almost straight and almost parallel, and every one of them leans in towards the same point at the western end. The two halves were not brought inside one ring of walls until 1320/25. Walk out of one and into the other and your feet notice before you do.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 2, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 3
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Gasse
- The ordinary word for a street here, and it is on more of them than anything else. Bindergasse, Entengasse, Rosengasse, Tuchgasse, Lammsgasse. If a name here ends in anything, it ends in this.
- Gäßchen
- The same thing after it has been squeezed. Schmalzgäßchen, Heugäßchen, Kannengäßchen, Wollengäßchen, Stangengäßchen. My preferred width.
- -tormauer
- A street that runs along the inside of the town wall, named for the gate it starts at. Frauentormauer, Neutormauer, Maxtormauer, Spittlertormauer, Vestnertormauer, Westtormauer. Walk one of those and you are eating the wall.
- Zwinger
- The strip between the outer wall and the inner one, which is now a street with a name of its own. Laufertorzwinger, Spittlertorzwinger, Tuchmacherzwinger, Königs- und Frauentorzwinger. Long, narrow, walled on both sides.
- -schmied
- A smith, and the trade got the lane. Pfannenschmiedsgasse for pans, Rotschmiedsgasse for red brass, Zirkelschmiedsgasse for compasses, plus an Obere and an Untere Schmiedgasse. The work has gone. The addresses stayed.
- Steg
- A footbridge that counts as a street. Kettensteg and Hoher Steg cross the water on not much more than planks and iron. No car has ever been on either, and they still have dots.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 257streets
- 2,633dots
- 41.6km of street
- 53.6km on foot
- 15.3hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.