Dresden audiotours

Dresden was known as the 'Florence of the Elbe' before February 1945, when Allied bombing raids over three nights destroyed most of the Baroque city that Augustus the Strong had built in the first half of the 18th century. What happened next is one of the stranger stories in European architecture: the city methodically stored and catalogued the rubble, waited through forty years of socialist indifference, and then after reunification began reconstructing the Frauenkirche stone by numbered stone. The church reopened in 2005 and the rebuilt dome is now indistinguishable from 18th-century photographs, a feat of reconstruction that was either admirable or surreal depending on your views about authenticity.

The Zwinger, a Baroque palace complex by Matthaeus Daniel Poppelmann, was partly built and partly still under construction when Augustus died and the project was abandoned mid-idea, which is why one side was left open to the Elbe for two centuries until a neoclassical wing was added in the 1840s.

This accidental asymmetry gives it a more honest character than perfect palaces usually have. The Semperoper, designed by Gottfried Semper and rebuilt after a fire in 1869, is still considered one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world, and performances here are worth attending if schedules align.