Weimar

The Markt is the centre of the old town, a broad square framed by the neo-Gothic town hall and by the Cranach House, a Renaissance town house with carved gables where Lucas Cranach the Elder, the painter of the Reformation, spent the last year of his life. The pedestrian streets around it are the town's shopping streets, and like most shops in Germany they close on Sundays. In October the Zwiebelmarkt, the onion market the town has held since the 17th century, fills the square and the lanes around it with stalls hung with plaited strings of onions; in Advent the square holds the Christmas market.

A few minutes' walk from the Markt, the town church of St Peter and St Paul on Herderplatz is called the Herder Church after Johann Gottfried Herder, the philosopher who preached here, lies buried inside and stands in bronze before the door. The late Gothic hall church holds the winged altarpiece that Lucas Cranach the Elder began and his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger, completed after his death: beneath the cross stand Martin Luther, pointing to his open Bible, and the elder Cranach himself, with a stream of blood from Christ's side falling on his head.

A short walk from the Markt, Theaterplatz is the square of the German National Theatre (Deutsches Nationaltheater), the town's stage for drama, opera and concerts, in which Germany's constitution of 1919 was drawn up. In front of it stands the bronze monument to Goethe and Schiller, the two poets side by side with a single laurel wreath held between them.

A few minutes' walk from Theaterplatz, at the edge of the Weimarhallenpark, the Bauhaus Museum Weimar stands as a plain concrete cube. It is given to the school Walter Gropius founded in Weimar in 1919, which taught here until it moved to Dessau in 1925, and its floors show what the Weimar workshops made — furniture, ceramics, metalwork, weaving, printing and painting — together with the teaching behind them.

From Theaterplatz, Schillerstraße, a pedestrian street of shops and cafés, leads to the Frauenplan. On the way stands Schiller's House, the town house Friedrich Schiller bought in 1802 and lived in until his death in 1805, where he wrote William Tell; its rooms are furnished as in his last years, with his study under the roof. The street ends at the Frauenplan, a small square fronted by the long baroque house that was Goethe's home from 1782 until his death in 1832.

A few minutes from the Frauenplan, Platz der Demokratie opens onto the edge of the park, with an equestrian statue of Duke Carl August on the square. On one side stands the Fürstenhaus, an 18th-century ducal residence that now houses the Liszt School of Music, whose students and teachers give concerts through the year; on another the Green Palace, a Renaissance palace converted for the library of the Duchess Anna Amalia in the 1760s. Its Rococo Hall rises through galleries of white and gold, lined with leather-bound volumes, busts and portraits, and was restored after a fire in 2004. The hall admits a limited number of visitors at set entry times, so a ticket booked ahead is the sure way in, above all in summer.

Beyond the library, the Park on the Ilm follows the river past the old town, a landscape park of meadows, groves and winding paths that Duke Carl August laid out from the late 1770s, with Goethe among its makers. Across the river from the town stands Goethe's Garden House, the plain cottage under a steep roof that the duke gave him in 1776; he lived there until 1782 and kept it as a retreat, and its rooms are open to visitors. The Roman House, a small classical villa built for the duke in the 1790s, stands on a terrace above the river. At the park's edge on Marienstraße, the Liszt House is the former court gardener's house where Franz Liszt lived in his later years in Weimar.

A short walk from the Liszt House, the Bauhaus taught in two buildings Henry van de Velde had designed in the early 20th century for the town's art school and its school of arts and crafts; both now belong to the Bauhaus University, and guided tours lead inside, among other rooms to Gropius's reconstructed director's office. Across the park, on the street Am Horn, the Haus Am Horn, designed by the painter Georg Muche for the school's exhibition of 1923, was the first house the Bauhaus built: a flat-roofed white cube around a tall living room lit by high windows, with the smaller rooms arranged around it. The two school buildings and the house are World Heritage, together with the Bauhaus sites in Dessau and Bernau.

A short walk from the Frauenplan, the Historic Cemetery is a tree-shaded burial ground of the 19th century. In it stands the Ducal Vault, the classical burial chapel of the grand ducal family, whose crypt keeps the coffins of Goethe and Schiller beside those of the dukes; Schiller's is empty, since the remains laid in it proved not to be his. Beside the vault stands a small Russian Orthodox chapel with gilded domes, built for the grand duchess Maria Pavlovna, a daughter of the Russian tsar.

On Humboldtstraße, a little out from the centre, the Villa Silberblick is the house where Friedrich Nietzsche spent his last years, until his death in 1900. His sister kept his papers here as the Nietzsche Archive, and its ground-floor rooms were redesigned by Henry van de Velde, down to the furniture.

Two summer residences of the ducal family lie a few kilometres from the centre. The Belvedere, a baroque palace on a rise at the end of the long Belvederer Allee, has an orangery and a landscape park around it. Tiefurt House, the small country house where the Duchess Anna Amalia gathered her circle in summer, stands in a landscape park beside the Ilm, where the court once staged plays in the open air.