Capital of BavariaMünchen.

One of the finest collections of Old Master paintings in the world — assembled by the Wittelsbach dynasty (the rulers of Bavaria from 1180 to 1918) and opened to the public in 1836. The collection spans 14th–18th century European painting: Dürer's Four Apostles and Self-Portrait (1500, the defining image of the Renaissance artist as intellectual), Rubens' enormous altarpieces and his tender oil sketches, Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross, Raphael's Canigiani Holy Family, and the finest collection of early German painting outside the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. €4 on Sundays — one of the best value days in European art.

The largest science and technology museum in the world — 73,000 exhibited objects across 80 departments on a museum island in the Isar, founded in 1903 by Oskar von Miller. The original Junkers F13 aircraft (the world's first all-metal commercial aircraft, 1919), a replica of the Altamira cave paintings, the first German submarine, a full-scale coal mine you can walk through, working astronomical instruments, the laboratory where Hahn and Strassmann demonstrated nuclear fission in 1938, and the complete physics collection including original apparatus from Faraday, Ohm and Maxwell. Allow a full day; a morning visit will only penetrate a fraction of the collection.

The summer residence of the Wittelsbach kings — a Baroque palace begun 1664 and expanded over nearly a century, with a 600-metre facade facing a formal canal and park. Inside: the Gallery of Beauties (36 portraits of women considered beautiful by King Ludwig I, including a butcher's daughter painted alongside a duchess with equal attention), the Porcelain Museum (Nymphenburg porcelain — the finest German porcelain manufactory, still producing), the royal carriages, and the sleigh that transported King Ludwig II through the Bavarian Alps. The park (180 hectares) has pavilions, grottos and a bathhouse. Mozart was baptised in the chapel at Nymphenburg in 1756.

The most important museum in Germany for understanding the origins of National Socialism — opened in 2015 on the exact site of the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters from 1931. Munich was the birthplace and operational centre of the Nazi movement: Hitler lived here from 1913, the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 happened here, and the city was designated "Capital of the Movement" (Hauptstadt der Bewegung) in 1935. The museum documents exactly why Munich was the specific city where fascism developed — the conditions, the individuals, the decisions — with a directness and a willingness to address local complicity that distinguishes it from many German memorial institutions.