Munich Residenz

This is the largest city palace in Germany, and the Wittelsbach dynasty spent over four centuries making sure everyone knew it. What started as a modest Gothic moated castle in 1385 grew into a 40,000-square-metre complex with ten courtyards and 130 rooms open to visitors — the architectural equivalent of a family that could never stop renovating. Between 1508 and 1918, it served as the seat of Bavarian dukes, electors, and finally kings, each generation adding their own wing in whatever style was fashionable at the time.

The Antiquarium is the showstopper — a 69-metre-long barrel-vaulted hall built in 1571 to house Duke Albrecht V's collection of classical sculptures. It's the largest Renaissance interior north of the Alps, with frescoes covering every surface and views of over a hundred Bavarian towns painted into the lunettes. The room doubled as a banqueting hall, because apparently dining surrounded by Roman busts was the Wittelsbach idea of a casual dinner.

The Treasury holds one of Europe's most significant collections of royal regalia, spanning a thousand years. The star piece is the statuette of St. George, a dazzling work from around 1599 encrusted with 2,291 diamonds, 209 pearls, and 406 rubies. The Bavarian crown jewels are here too, along with the prayer book of Charles the Bold and exotic treasures from the dynasty's centuries of strategic marriages and diplomatic gift exchanges.

World War II destroyed much of the Residenz — Allied bombing raids between 1943 and 1945 gutted most of the interior. The painstaking reconstruction took decades, with some rooms not completed until the 1980s. Today, walking through the Ancestral Gallery with its 121 portraits of Wittelsbach family members, it's easy to forget that nearly every surface you see was rebuilt from rubble. The quality of the restoration is itself a remarkable achievement.