Römer

If you have seen one photo of Frankfurt that was not a skyline shot, it was almost certainly this one: three narrow gabled houses in the middle of a cobbled square, with a balcony across the front. The building is called the Römer, after the merchant family that sold it to the city council in March 1405, and Frankfurt has run its municipal business out of it ever since. That makes it one of the longest continuously used city halls in Europe.

The Römer is not a museum, so there is no ticket line and no set tour. It is a working city hall, and the rooms upstairs in the Haus Löwenstein are Frankfurt's civil wedding venue, which means you will often see a wedding party spilling out onto the square. What visitors come for is the exterior and the square in front of it, the Römerberg, which is the historic heart of the Old Town and the site of the Christmas market every Advent.

The complex grew by acquisition rather than design. The city bought neighboring houses one at a time between 1435 and 1878 and connected them, which produced what one 19th-century Frankfurt historian described as a labyrinth of staircases, courtyards and halls. Today it covers roughly 10,000 square meters, or about 108,000 square feet, across nine houses arranged around six courtyards. The neo-Gothic facade and the balcony you see now date from a redesign that started in 1890.

Look closely at the middle house and you can read a compressed version of German history: Frankfurtia, the female personification of the city, on the left corner, and four Holy Roman Emperors in the center. They are Friedrich Barbarossa, the first king elected in Frankfurt; Ludwig the Bavarian, who granted the city its trade fair rights; Karl IV, who made Frankfurt the official site of imperial elections; and Maximilian II, the first emperor crowned in the Frankfurt cathedral.

The balcony is still Frankfurt's public stage. National teams have been received there after tournaments, and it is where the city greets visiting heads of state. On the night of March 22, 1944, the Römer burned along with most of the Old Town in one of the heaviest Allied raids of the war. Reconstruction was deliberately simplified, and President Theodor Heuss reopened the building in 1955. Two later restorations, in 1974 and 2005, brought back the 1900 look.

Two rooms inside survive almost unchanged after six centuries: the Römerhalle and the Schwanenhalle on the ground floor, where Frankfurt's first book fairs were held and goldsmiths sold their work. Above them sits the Kaisersaal, the imperial hall used for coronation banquets, now hung with portraits of all 52 Holy Roman Emperors. When it is open to the public, it is worth the short climb.