Stuttgart audiotours

Stuttgart sits in a bowl, the Kessel, ringed by forested hills and cut through by vineyard terraces that produce actual, drinkable Trollinger and Lemberger wine right within the city limits. It is a strange arrangement: one of Germany's most industrially serious cities, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche and their respective museums, wrapped in a topography that looks borrowed from the Rhine valley.

The car museums alone would justify a trip.

The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Bad Cannstatt traces the entire history of the automobile from the Benz Patent-Motorwagen of 1885, and the Porsche Museum in Zuffenhausen is a piece of architecture as interesting as the cars inside it. But Stuttgart is also the city of the Staatsgalerie, one of Germany's finest art collections, whose James Stirling extension from 1984 is a postmodern landmark still worth studying. The Weissenhof Estate, a 1927 housing exhibition designed by Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius among others, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the edge of the city.