Frankfurt Audio Tours

Frankfurt's skyline is the most American thing in Germany -- a cluster of glass towers along the Main River that earned the city its nickname 'Mainhattan' and houses the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, and the skyscraper that Norman Foster designed for Commerzbank in 1997 using a helical garden system that made it briefly the tallest building in Europe. The financial district is real and serious, but Frankfurt is a city of real and serious contradictions: Goethe was born here in 1749 in a house on the Grosser Hirschgraben that you can still visit, and the Römerberg -- the medieval square of half-timbered houses rebuilt after wartime bombing -- sits about 300 meters from the trading floors.

The Museumsufer, a two-kilometer stretch of the Main's south bank, holds fifteen museums in close succession: the Stadel (old masters and a significant modern wing underground), the German Film Museum, the Museum of Communication, the Architecture Museum.

On the first weekend of August, the riverbanks host the Museumsuferfest, one of Germany's largest outdoor festivals. Across the river, the Sachsenhausen neighborhood preserves the Ebbelwei culture -- apple wine drunk in ceramic jugs, served cold in a ribbed glass called a Geripptes, in taverns called Apfelweinstuben that have been operating essentially unchanged since the 18th century.